creator:

Agribusiness Accountability Project

title:

Records

dates:

1970-1975

extent:

14.7 linear ft.

collection number:

MS 68

repository:

Special Collections Department, Iowa State University.

access:

Open for research

publication rights:

Consult Head, Special Collections Department

preferred citation:

Agribusiness Accountability Project Records, MS 68, Special Collections Department, Iowa State University Library.

A public interest organization founded in 1970 and based in Washington, D.C., the Agribusiness Accountability Project was the joint endeavor of three Washington public interest groups: the Project on Corporate Responsibility, the Center for Community Change, and the Washington Research Project. It was funded by the Field Foundation and staffed by Jerry J. Berman, Jim Hightower, Nancy Mills, and Philip Sorensen. Initially concerned with migrant and seasonal farm workers, it soon turned to additional issues such as corporate power in agriculture, the land grant college system, cooperatives, rural social movements, and tax loss farming. The project resulted in the books Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times: The Failure of the Land Grant College Complex (1972) and Eat Your Heart Out: Food Profiteering in America (1975), both written by Jim Hightower.

Collection description
 

The collection includes correspondence, reports, newspaper clippings, press releases, statements and testimony, scripts, memoranda, and printed materials. It also contains manuscripts and research notes for Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times and Eat Your Heart Out. Subjects in the research files include the role of agribusiness/corporations in agriculture; migration from small farms to urban areas; migrant workers; nomination of Earl Butz as Secretary of Agriculture; rural social movements in the seventies; the land grant college system; food action campaign; cooperatives; farm taxation; and the National Farmers Organization.