Jimmy Carter was the last working farmer to have been elected president. His administration’s agricultural legacy was formed by events not entirely of his making.

Carter, 100, died last month, nearly 44 years after leaving office. He is remembered as a moral and decent man who lived his Christian faith. Carter is often said to be the most consequential former president in the country’s history — a humanitarian, human rights advocate and Nobel Prize winner.

Farmers remember Carter for his decision to embargo grain sales to the Soviet Union after it invaded Afghanistan in 1979, which started the farm economic crisis that gripped much of rural America through the 1980s.

Many factors played a role.

Farmland values exploded during the 1970s. During the Nixon administration, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz encouraged grain farmers to plant “fence row to fence row” and to “get big or get out.”

Many farmers, particularly in the Midwest, took his advice. Commodity prices were strong, and money was cheap. As land prices rose, farmers used their equity to finance ever larger purchases.

Life was good.

But, inflation was a nagging economic problem throughout the 1970s. In 1979, Carter appointed Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve. He tackled the problem by aggressively increasing interest rates.

That same year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Carter canceled corn, wheat and soybean sales to the USSR.

“While this invasion continues, we and other nations of the world cannot conduct business as usual with the Soviet Union,” he said.

Unfortunately, the world was awash with grain that year, and other producing countries picked up the slack. U.S. farmers found themselves with bins full of grain that suddenly was worth a lot less.

Wendell Tuttle, a crop and livestock producer in Southern Iowa, recalled what happened in a documentary for Iowa PBS.

“. . . my net worth dropped $20,000 overnight. About that time I had to refinance the farming operation and he said, ‘well you can’t do that. You lost $20,000.’ I said, ‘I didn’t lose it, Carter lost it for me’.”

Like thousands of other farmers, Wendell then found when he had to refinance his operating loan, interest rates had more than doubled.

And, as the value of commodities fell, so did the value of the land producing them. Many highly leveraged farmers found that their debt exceeded the value of their assets.

It only got worse as farmers defaulted and suffered two droughts during the Reagan years. Through the 1980s, 300,000 farming operations went out of business.

Many complicated factors led to the crisis. Farm production soared. Farmers increased their debt, leveraging themselves in unprecedented fashion. Lenders often made loans that weren’t supported by market conditions. Commodity prices dropped. Cold war politics and monetary policy tipped the dominos.

The reckoning would have come, with or without the embargo.

The fuel for the crisis was gathered even before Carter became president. The embargo lit the match, but the flames spread unabated for nearly a decade through the Reagan administration.

Farmers still live with its consequences.