On December 10, 1977, approximately 5,000 farmers held a rally in Lincoln, Nebraska, to protest low commodity prices and high production costs. The protesters were joined by Nebraska's Democratic Governor J. James Exon. The farmers all rode their tractors. The protest soon spread to other farm states who also had tractor rallies. Gloria Carter Spann, a sister of President Jimmy Carter even participated in one rally.

Farmers threatened to go on strike by ceasing their farming activities, although it was really an empty threat. While the farmers appeared to have widespread sympathy, relatively few farmers actually went on strike and refused to grow crops. The American Agriculture Movement was the organization behind the protests. It consisted primarily of small American farmers and it was formed in 1977 in Campo, Colorado, by a group of farmers. They attempted to organize a strike in which farmers would no longer buy or sell anything. Their most prominent protest was a planned tractor rally in Washington, DC.

In January 1979, nearly 3,000 farmers drove their tractors to Washington, D.C., many of them from thousands of miles away. On February 5, 1979, farmers arrived in Washington, D.C. Authorities were quick to react and 17 tractors were impounded. Police confined the tractors to the National Mall, but not before the tractors blocked traffic, creating significant tie-ups. A group of Maryland farmers later attempted to repair the damage to the Mall, by sowing grass seed.

A blizzard hit while they were in town, and then the tractors became useful as they were the only vehicles that could reliably travel through the snow. Many of these vehicles were used to deliver doctors and nurses to hospitals.

Concern that traffic would be hopelessly tangled led DC area commuters to use transit instead and this led to record numbers in transit use. An estimated 277,000 trips were taken on February 5, breaking the single-day record set in early January and topping 250,000 trips for the first time ever. The record would last until the summer when the caused an uptick in metro use.

President Jimmy Carter agreed that the Farmers Home Administration would stop all farm foreclosures, but this was short-lived. Soon after the rally had ended, FHA resumed foreclosures of farms with past due loans.

Carter, being a farmer himself, offered a sympathetic word of support saying, “I don’t know of any other group that has suffered more from inflation than farmers.” Much of Congress did not feel the same way, even the farmers among them. Freshman Democrat from Texas and farmer, Charles W. Stenholm was worried about the effectiveness of a "tractorcade." “The farmers’ story is still valid. Their income levels are still not adequate, but I question the advisability of a tractorcade. I don’t feel a tractorcade will be helpful this year.”

On Feb. 23, D.C. Police Chief Burtell M. Jefferson ordered that all future tractorcades in Washington be banned, “until the farmers can come up with some sort of responsible leadership.” By the end of the tractorcade, the cost of the protest had begun to add up. The city had estimated the bill totaled $125,000 each day, and the Park Service tallied an additional $50,000 daily to pay overtime salaries and ball parked damages to the Mall itself at around $1 million.

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