Agricultural Policy In The 1800s

Agricultural policy serves to protect the consumer, the environment and the economy. There have been many revisions, additions and changes made over the decades to agricultural policies. There were nearly 5,308,483 people in the world according to the US census in 1800s when these policies were initially written. Policies were created that were relevant to the time. Then, people of the time relied on local family farms and individualized stores for much of their food. Over the years, farms were commercialized and store became on stops hops. The federal government oversees the maintaining agricultural policies and adapts them when deemed necessary. “Not until the 1920s did [government] formulate policies to specifically regulate fundamental market forces in the agricultural sector” (Miller, 2011). The 1800s saw many provisions, but the twenties were the beginning of massive changes to agricultural policies that paved the way for current policies today.
The first major stride towards government intervention related to agricultural policy was the Homestead Act of 1862. The act was comprised of multiple federal laws that offered ownership of land to applicants which began the normalization of individual farms. People could now own their own farm, as opposed to one person owning large amounts of land to farm on. Any adult that had not ever “taken arms against the U.S government” was eligible. This was crucial because immigrants, farmers that had no land of their own, single women and former slaves could apply. It was a was revolutionary idea; people could own their own land to increase agricultural production. The Homestead Act was put to an end with the enactment of the Federal Land policy and Management Act of 1976 due to chronic abuses of the