The Marriage of Iron and Rye is the name given to the coalition of interests between industry and agriculture that supported the adoption of protectionism in Imperial Germany by the Tariff of 1879.
[5] However, industrialists favoured tariffs against British goods to safeguard their infant industries and therefore came to believe that winning over the farmers to protectionism was crucial.
[6] In the late 1870s world grain prices started to fall due to the opening up of the American prairies to cultivation following the settlement of the Midwest after the Civil War.
[11] The adoption of protectionism by the Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, signalled a shift towards a greater reliance on the Conservatives for support rather than on the National Liberals.
The historian Erich Eyck argued that if Germany's political culture at the beginning of the 20th century differed from Western Europe, agricultural protection was largely responsible.