The tobacco plant, Nicotiana tabacum. Public-domain photograph.
The Agricultural Act of 1956 paid farmers to idle land, while smaller farm households kept leaving for town wages the crop price would no longer support.
A stretched farm household could take the soil-bank payment and still not make a living, and the way out was a move to a wage.
A larger operator could idle the weak acres, collect the payment, and keep farming the rest with machines.
A shop in a county that was emptying lost customers, and a bigger farm that bought the neighbor’s place gained the acres the neighbor could not carry.
Price supports had encouraged more production than the market cleared, and surpluses sat in public hands.
The Soil Bank paid to take land out of crops, the same family of ideas as the 1933 reductions, aimed at supply rather than at a guaranteed income for a small family.
The households that left were often the ones whose farms were too small for the machines the remaining farms were buying.
Agricultural Act of 1956