"It is obvious that the greatest and most important service that is required of our agriculture under existing conditions is an enlarged production of the staple food crops"
About this Quote
“Obvious” is doing heavy political lifting here. Houston, a high-ranking U.S. agriculture official in an era when farm policy was becoming a central instrument of national management, frames a contested agenda as plain common sense. The sentence has the clipped, managerial cadence of Progressive-era governance: identify the “service” the sector must render, define it as “required,” then narrow the mission to measurable output. Agriculture isn’t a way of life or a regional identity; it’s a national utility with a deliverable.
The key phrase is “under existing conditions,” a soft placeholder for crisis without naming the culprits. It invites the audience to import their own anxieties - war pressures, price volatility, urban growth, fragile supply chains, or the lingering memory of shortages - while keeping the speaker above partisan blame. That vagueness is strategic: it converts emergency into a policy mandate.
Houston’s emphasis on “staple food crops” is also a quiet rebuke to agricultural diversity and to market-driven farming choices. Staples mean calories, stability, and state priorities. The subtext is that farmers’ autonomy is negotiable when national need tightens. “Enlarged production” sounds like neutral efficiency, but it signals a shift toward coordinated agriculture: extension services, credit, acreage decisions, and eventually the logic that the government can legitimately steer what gets planted.
Rhetorically, the sentence works by shrinking the moral horizon. It doesn’t ask what agriculture should be; it declares what it must do. In that narrowness lies its power: when food becomes security, the only acceptable politics is more.
The key phrase is “under existing conditions,” a soft placeholder for crisis without naming the culprits. It invites the audience to import their own anxieties - war pressures, price volatility, urban growth, fragile supply chains, or the lingering memory of shortages - while keeping the speaker above partisan blame. That vagueness is strategic: it converts emergency into a policy mandate.
Houston’s emphasis on “staple food crops” is also a quiet rebuke to agricultural diversity and to market-driven farming choices. Staples mean calories, stability, and state priorities. The subtext is that farmers’ autonomy is negotiable when national need tightens. “Enlarged production” sounds like neutral efficiency, but it signals a shift toward coordinated agriculture: extension services, credit, acreage decisions, and eventually the logic that the government can legitimately steer what gets planted.
Rhetorically, the sentence works by shrinking the moral horizon. It doesn’t ask what agriculture should be; it declares what it must do. In that narrowness lies its power: when food becomes security, the only acceptable politics is more.
Quote Details
| Topic | Food |
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