Subsidizing Soybeans and Cottonseed

Earl Butts was President Richard Nixon's Agricultural Secretary in the early 1970s. He created a new subsidy structure whereby the government essentially was paying farmers to grow more food and grow more corn especially. And he also led to the rise of an agribusiness sector that was dominated by huge conglomerates. We've ended up with a subsidy system that treats fruits and vegetables as specialty crops and gives them nothing except for a few very small pilot projects.