Much effort was spent to propagate information and make the peasantry adopt modern farming methods.
Increasing yields and saving the balance of trade were contradicting aims but imported inputs in animal nutrition were successfully replaced without a drop in production.
Protectionism, gradually implemented since Bismarck’s time, and import quotas set up in the last Weimar years were continued and expanded.
Prices for agricultural produce were now determined by the RNS rather than the market. It hoped to direct production and increase the rural standard of living with them. Price increases in 1934 were met with widespread discontent (1934 was a crisis year), and from then on political pressure forced the RNS to keep them low. This backfired when demand rose as the economy recovered, leading to some shortages of meat and butter, not because of lack of production but because higher prices would have been necessary to stimulate production and lower demand. In 1938 higher prices would be paid to dairy suppliers but consumer prices weren’t raised, stimulating production but doing nothing with demand. There was also some subtle rationing.
The RNS administered the food supply and stocks.
An escape from land hunger was the addition of farmland to the Reich. An increment of 7-8 million ha to the existing 34 million would be enough. Thus, with a rational basis, agrarians were enthusiastic supporters of military expansionism and the Drang nach Osten, which would serve the same purpose as previous European colonialisms and, in their mold, reserve a secondary status for the conquered populations. Herbert Backe, future Minister, mentioned in his 1926 dissertation “The Russian grain economy as the basis for the people and economy of Russia” an uplifting of Russia’s farmland through ‘the infiltration of foreign ethnic elements of higher quality that will form themselves into an upper class and do battle with the mass of the population. The reservoir [for this infiltration] will be "The People without Space"’. (p.180) Walther Darré, who headed the Ministry for a long time, spoke to an audience of RNS officials in early 1936 directly of settlement all the way to the Urals: “The natural area for settlement by the German people is the territory to the east of the Reich's boundaries up to the Urals, bordered in the south by the Caucasus, Caspian Sea, Black Sea and the watershed which divides the Mediterranean basin from the Baltic and the North Sea. We will settle this space, according to the law that a superior people always has the right to conquer and to own the land of an inferior people”. (p.198)