Secretary of Agriculture Henry Cantwell Wallace floated the possibility of restricting the number of acres that each farmer would be allowed to farm, but the unpopularity of this proposal among farmers made it politically infeasible. After the 1924 elections, the Coolidge administration introduced an agricultural plan that emphasized agricultural cooperatives to help control prices, but it found little favor among farmers. The farm bloc instead coalesced behind the ideas of George Peek, whose proposals to raise farm prices inspired the McNary–Haugen Farm Relief Bill. McNary–Haugen proposed the establishment of a federal farm board that would purchase surplus production in high-yield years and hold it for later sale or sell it abroad. The government would lose money in selling the crops abroad, but would recoup some of that loss through fees on farmers who benefited from the program. Proponents of the bill argued that the program was little different from protective tariffs, which they argued were used to disproportionately benefit industrial concerns. Coolidge opposed McNary-Haugen, declaring that agriculture must stand "on an independent business basis," and said that "government control cannot be divorced from political control." The first and second incarnations of the McNary-Haugen bill were defeated in 1924 and 1925, but the bill remained popular as the farm crisis continued.
