I don't know if anybody has answered you as I haven't scanned the whole thread carefully. In that time period( I don't know if it was exactly '73) there were news accounts of farmers digging trenches with bulldozers and killing and burying their cows rather than sell for a loss. They couldn't afford to feed them and take the price meat was going for. A similar thing happened with milk farmers, they poured out their milk for the camera's rather than sell it. Then they too sent their cows for slaughter because they couldn't feed them. Shortly after that, for several years, the big story was farmers going belly up and moving to the city after several decades of family farming. There were televised farm auctions where people were buying their lifelong friends personal belongings for a dime on the dollar. It was quite disturbing for me, not so much for the personal drama's of the poor people, but for the loss of farmland to developers, never to be farmed again. We were lulled into thinking the land was worth more with malls on them, but I always wondered what we would do when we NEEDED the food. As a side note, this was also the rise of the corporate farm. They would buy several farms to make mega farms and drive the neighbors out of business because THEY got the biggest subsidies. That is still true today. Some "farmers" are drawing $20million on Wall Street, while the family guy gets a chump change.
I find it objectionable to subsidize farmers to keep them afloat, but OTOH, if they fall on hard times, it's not like you can knock down a mall and parking lot to plow it up for food. Once it's gone, it's gone. Hawaii is sort of going through this now. They will no longer have any pineapple or sugar cane farms soon, because the land is worth too much to grow crops when you can put up a multimillion dollar high rise. When a farmer that paid $200 and acre for his land can get $5000 and acre, why would you just not sell and clip coupons?
Thanks for that, now that you remind me, I do remember those things.
Something similar happened in the 90’s (I think that was the time, I had already left farming) but hogs went down to 10 cent lb. It was caused by over production, the ever-present nemesis of the farmer.
That meant you could buy an entire market hog for $20. Having raised over 200,000 hogs myself, I know that those guys had at least $80 in each animal. That lead to bankruptcy for a lot of hog farmers, opening the door for the mega hog farms that raise several hundred thousand market animals each year.