Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933

The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 was a centerpiece of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt' s New Deal response to the Great Depression, aiming to raise catastrophically low farm commodity prices by paying farmers subsidies to reduce their planted acreage and livestock herds for staple crops including cotton, wheat, corn, hogs and dairy. The policy proved highly controversial, both for the deliberate destruction of crops and livestock at a time of widespread hunger and for its legal foundation, which the US Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional in the 1936 case United States v. Butler; Congress responded the following year with a second Agricultural Adjustment Act built on different constitutional grounds, establishing the basic framework of federal commodity price support that shaped US farm policy for decades afterward.