Excerpts: Drought, with its threat of crop failure on millions of acres of the Nation’s farms, in the early months of 1934, focused attention sharply on the crop-income insurance features of the adjustment programs that farmers are carrying out under the authority of the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Designed primarily to permit production adjustments in line with the lessened effective demand of contracted markets and to cut down burdensome surpluses, the various crop adjustment programs also afford the greatest farm crop insurance operation ever undertaken anywhere in the world. After many years of agitation in many States for crop-income insurance, such insurance is provided on a big scale in the adjustment programs. The rental or benefit payments to farmers who take part in the program are based on past production averages rather than on the current crop. The amount of these payments, therefore, is not diminished by a current crop failure. These assured payments guarantee that a cooperating farmer will have some income, even if his crop fails utterly.
