Serving under President Richard M. Nixon and his successor, Gerald R. Ford, Mr. Butz was a forceful, sharp-tongued figure who engineered legislation sharply reducing federal subsidies for farmers. He was the best known secretary of agriculture since Henry A. Wallace in the Depression days, when the federal government began to pay farmers to keep some of their cropland and livestock out of production in the face of plunging income.

Mr. Butz maintained that a free-market policy, encouraging farmers to produce more and to sell their surplus overseas, could bring them higher prices. Farm income did rise during his time in office, in good measure the result of a huge grain shipment to the Soviet Union in 1972, but American consumers paid more for food. Mr. Butz was an important source of political support in the Midwest farm belt for the Nixon and Ford administrations. But he was criticized by Democrats in Congress who viewed him as the voice of “agribusiness,” the corporate agricultural interests, at the expense of small farmers and consumers.

Mr. Butz said he reflected rural values learned as an Indiana farm boy and he gave no ground to critics. When environmentalists warned against pesticides and fertilizers, he retorted, “Before we go back to organic agriculture, somebody is going to have to decide what 50 million people we are going to let starve.”

Speaking before members of a farm credit association in Champaign, Ill., in 1973, he said that if housewives did not have “such a low level of economic intelligence,” they would understand that the price of everything had gone up and “you can’t get more by paying less.”

Earl Lauer Butz was born on a farm near Albion, Ind., on July 3, 1909, and grew up guiding horse-drawn plows. He graduated from Purdue University in West Lafayette in 1932. Five years later, he received Purdue’s first doctorate in agricultural economics. He was head of Purdue’s agricultural economics department from 1946 to 1954.