USDA history

The Association of Official Agricultural Chemists (an organization Wiley founded in 1884) began lobbying for federal legislation governing the packing and purity of food products.

In 1889 USDA attained the status of a cabinet department, and farm journalist Norman Jay Colman became the first secretary of agriculture.

The Meat Inspection Act of 1890 gave USDA the job of inspecting exported meat, a function soon expanded to give the Department an extensive role in insuring the safety of domestic and exported foods.

The first widespread public attention to the unsafe practices of the meatpacking industry came in 1898, when the press reported that Armour & Co., had supplied tons of rotten canned beef to the United States Army in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.

Thus, by 1900 the US Department of Agriculture had been established for nearly four decades, had been a Cabinet-level department for one, and was recognized as a rising star among agricultural science institutions.

In 1904 Sinclair covered a labour strike at Chicago’s Union Stockyards for the socialist magazine Appeal to Reason and proposed that he spend a year in Chicago to write an exposé of the Beef Trust’s exploitation of workers.

Of those journalists, American writer Charles Edward Russell is perhaps best known, for his series of articles about the Beef Trust that were published as The Greatest Trust in the World (1905).

The Meat Inspection Act was passed by the Congress of the United States and signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt on June 30, 1906.

In 1914, the Smith-Lever Act funded services of teaching agriculture and home economics to the public which extended the USDA’s reach across the country.

Following the collapse of wartime farm commodity prices in 1920, agriculture entered a new era in which surplus production would depress farm income and create demands for new forms of assistance.

The Department's fledgling economics work was bolstered by the 1922 establishment of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, whose analyses were designed to help farmers make better management decisions.

While farm programs have been much modified since then, most of the subsequent tools for price support and adjustment were first used under the 1933 act.

Most of these new functions brought new agencies with them, and by 1940 USDA's employment had reached a peak of close to 100,000.

USDA went through a substantial reorganization beginning in 1994 that reduced the number of agencies and consolidated most farm programs.

In order to modernize meat and poultry inspection, FSIS published a regulation in 1996 which has enabled the agency to employ the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point System (HACCP) as an added and improved safeguard.