ation of the soil bank in 1956. Before 1985, however,
government programs designed to protect produc-
tion and prices and those directed toward conserva-
tion were independent of each other.
By the beginning of the 1980’s, lessening foreign
demand for U.S. agricultural products and a cor-
responding decrease in market prices resulted in
significant surpluses and a costly increase in govern-
mental price supports for agricultural products. More-
over, conservation programs had not kept abreast of
agricultural developments in terms of cost-benefit
analysis, nor had the environmental impact of con-
servation programs received adequate attention. In
fact, programs encouraging production could actu-
ally conflict with those that promoted conservation.
The Food Security Act of 1985 attempted to address
these developments. The act comprised seventeen ti-
tles, the first ten of which regulated prices and estab-
lished quotas for dairy, wool and mohair, wheat, feed
grains, cotton, rice, soybeans, and sugar. Title 11 fo-
cused on trade and Title 12 on conservation. The
act created the Conservation Reserve Program, with
sodbusting, swampbusting, and compliance pro-
grams. Thus, the Food Security Act was the first law to
regulate both economic and environmental aspects
of American agriculture.
Conservation Measures Government soil conser-
vation programs had a history dating back to 1935,
when the Soil Conservation Service was established
to protect farmland for production purposes. Part
of the impetus for including a conservation title in
the Food Security Act came from environmentalists,
who recognized that it was easier to achieve environ-
mental legislation within a farm bill than separately.
In order to reduce the surplus of commodities, as well
as to protect water and soil resources on U.S. farms,
the Conservation Reserve Program, once created by
the 1985 law, revived the soil bank. By 1990, it aimed
to remove from production 40 to 45 million acres of
highly erodable land for periods of ten to fifteen years
per parcel. Participants in the program were to re-
ceive payments from government agencies in the
form of rents and cost-sharing for planting ground
cover. The program also sought to conserve habitats
for fish and other wildlife and to ensure that Ameri-
can fiber and food production was sustainable.
The Food Security Act’s sodbusting provision re-
quired farmers wishing to convert erodable land
into cropland to devise specific plans and submit
them for approval. Such plans had to be begun by- This rule denied financial support to farmers
who continued to farm erodable or otherwise envi-
ronmentally fragile land without putting conserva-
tion measures in place. Those farmers not comply-
ing with the act lost their eligibility for aid programs
sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Unlike soil conservation initiatives, in 1985, mea-
sures to protect wetlands were relatively recent. In-
deed, in the nineteenth century, the federal govern-
ment had given the states incentives to drain wetlands
rather than protect them. As such lands’ ecological
value became understood, however, legislators be-
came receptive to passing protective laws, starting
with the Water Pollution Control Act of 1972. The
Food Security Act increased such protections. Its
swampbuster provisions, like the sodbuster rules, pe-
nalized farmers who converted wetlands by denying
them the financial aid available through the various
federal farm programs. Farmers could voluntarily
drop out of such programs. The wording of these
provisions suggested that Congress’s philosophy of
conservation had changed over the previous de-
cade. Rather than conserving land simply in order to
ensure its future agricultural productivity, the new
law was written to protect the environment as a good
in itself.
As the first attempt to unite economic and envi-
ronmental protections, the Food Security Act had
some weaknesses. For example, wetlands could not
be drained for crops, but a farmer could drain
wetlands for other purposes, such as constructing
buildings or roads. Furthermore, only one penalty
existed; there was no consideration of the extent of
the infraction. The sodbuster rule made it difficult
for some farmers to increase their acreage, forcing
them to withdraw from governmental support to re-
main competitive. A major farm bill in 1990 ad-
dressed the shortcomings of the 1985 act; it also gave
farmers more flexibility in planting.
Impact By the end of 1989, nearly 34 million acres
of land had been retired from agricultural produc-
tion, and surplus stocks had fallen, aided by a drought
in 1988. Soil erosion dropped substantially during
the decade following the act’s passage. The rate of
wetland conversion for agricultural use had been
falling even before the act passed. Between 1982 and
1992, that conversion rate averaged only twenty-five
thousand acres per year, a number representing378 Food Security Act of 1985 The Eighties in America