Under the Agricultural Adjustment Act, what concrete action reduced production?

• A. 5 million pigs killed and thousands of hectares of cotton ploughed back into the ground.
• B. Farmers were paid to produce more.
• C. Subsidies were given for irrigation.
• D. Cotton production increased.

Answer: (A)

The test is about how the Agricultural Adjustment Act aimed to lift farm prices by cutting supply. The concrete action used to do this was to reduce production directly, paying farmers to limit what they produced. The stark example of five million pigs killed and thousands of hectares of cotton ploughed back into the ground shows this approach in practice—removing livestock and plowing under crops to shrink the market surplus. That’s why this option best fits the policy: it illustrates the mechanism of reducing output to raise prices. The other choices describe actions that would increase production, or describe subsidies not tied to cutting supply, which is opposite to what the act sought to achieve.