20 rarely seen images that show the struggle of America's farmers during the Great Depression

Farmers sit on bags of rice in a state mill in Abbeville, Louisiana in September 1938.

Farmer Chris Ament stands on his wheat farm in the Columbia Basin, where he has farmed for 33 years. "I won't live to get the benefits of the water, but I hope to be able to see it," he said to the FSA.

A clover farmer works on a seed threshing machine in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana.

This steelworker in Midland, Pennsylvania, also does some farming part-time.

The FSA's "rural rehabilitation" efforts transplanted farmers from futile land to areas with richer soil. Here, a rehabilitation client is pictured in Jefferson County, Kansas.

Mrs. Gernie Marshall, near Ringgold, Iowa, is the wife of Gernie Marshall, a tenant of a 115-acre farm. At the time this picture is taken, there have been no crops for three years, and the family is thinking of moving to California.

Here's a tenant farmer near Anniston, Alabama.

A farmer is seen in his tool house, near McLeansboro, Illinois.

Mrs. Morrison farms in the submarginal area of Rumsey Hill, near Erin, New York, in 1940.

Mr. Wright stands amidst the corn he has raised in Syracuse, Kansas.

A farmer is pictured on the front porch of his dilapidated home, south of Muskogee, Oklahoma. He's rented for eleven years. The land is owned by an out-of-state woman, and the farmer reports that the agent has changed so often that no one ever takes any interest in the condition of the land or buildings.

Mr. Leatherman loads a sack of pinto beans into his cart in Pie Town, New Mexico. It is customary for the farmers to leave their beans at the warehouse during the winter months.

A sharecropper's wife works the fields in New Madrid County, Missouri.

A sharecropper stands on his 20 acres of land near Bryan, Texas. He receives eight cents a day for hoeing cotton.

A sharecropper is seen in Lauderdale County, Mississippi, in 1935.

A former tenant farmer on a large cotton farm is now a tractor driver on the same farm in Bell County, Texas. He gets paid one dollar a day.

A farm woman works in fields along Route 79, just outside Ithaca, New York.

This man is one of the farmers whose land was optioned by the United States Resettlement Administration in Oneida County, Idaho.

Here's a rehabilitation client in Boone County, Arkansas, in 1935.

A former tenant farmer from Texas is now working as a pea picker in Nipomo, California.