[1] American farmers felt the brunt of the sanctions, and it had a much lesser effect on the Soviet Union, which brought the value of such embargoes into question.
[1] The Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 was met by the United States with numerous economic sanctions including the agricultural embargo.
[4][5] In 1980, according to both Yuzhin and Gordievsky, the KGB ordered its agents to conduct activities that discredited US President Jimmy Carter and supported Ronald Reagan during 1980 election.
The Soviet supplied products were from the William J. Casey, who, from 1974 to 1976, was chairman at the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Eximbank) and provided Eximbank loans to the Soviet Union, and Armand Hammer supported fertilizer détente that began while Richard Nixon was president of the United States.
[6] A year later, Reagan took power with the support of the Farm Bureau and ended the embargo on April 24, 1981, and therefore restored fertilizer détente which allowed shipments of natural gas, ammonia, urea and potash fertilizers to resume from the Soviet Union to the United States and shipments of phosphate fertilizer as superphosphoric acid to resume from Florida in the United States to the Soviet Union thus greatly enriching Armand Hammer's Occidental Petroleum.
The American Agriculture Movement was a group of farmers who protested the embargo through peaceful means such as the incidents with encircling the department's headquarters in few states with their tractors.