The Bund der Landwirte (Agrarian League) (BDL) was a German advocacy group founded 18 February 1893 by farmers and agricultural interests in response to the farm crisis of the 1890s, and more specifically the result of the protests against the low-tariff policies of Chancellor Leo von Caprivi, including his free trade policies.

According to James C Hunt, the Agrarian League was launched to protest the reduction in tariffs against imported grains; The old tariffs were designed to keep prices high for the farmers; this kept food prices high for urban consumers. The new tariffs were designed to lower the cost of food to consumers, and open up new business opportunities for German exporters. The League was organized nationally like a political party, with local chapters, centralized discipline, and a clear-cut platform. It fought against free trade, industrialization, and liberalism. Its most hated enemy was socialism, which it blamed on Jewish financial capitalism. The League helped establish grassroots anti-Semitism of the sort that flourished into the 1930s.

The Reichstag was dissolved in June 1878 because it refused Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Law. Chancellor Bismarck in the newly elected parliament relied on a broad agro-conservative majority with the slogan: Agriculture is owed by the state the same attention as industry; if both do not go hand in hand, the strength of one will not suffice for a lack in the other. Bismarck helped foster support from these conservatives by enacting several tariffs protecting German agriculture, and incidentally industry, from foreign competition.

In the early 1880s agriculture employed more people than industry and trade combined. However, Germany was fast becoming an industrialized state with increased rural exodus to the cities. After Bismarck resigned in 1890 and Leo von Caprivi became chancellor, the demands of industry were much more compelling, and the free trade treaties with Russia and Austria as well as legislation favorable to industry was seen as a threat to agriculture.

The inaugural meeting of the Bund der Landwirte was held in the Berlin Tivoli Brewery and was attended by some ten thousand people. It drew its support from the most Protestant areas of the empire, northern and central Germany, and particularly from Prussia. In May 1893, just three months after its establishment, it campaigned for farmers' rights and won over 140 of the deputies who were elected in July, or about one-third of the members of the Reichstag, including the influential group that would found the Economic Association (Wirtschaftliche Vereinigung) some years later with Wilhelm von Kardorff, Berthold von Ploetz and Diederich Hahn.

By the end of 1893 the BDL had over 200,000 members. Only about 1% were rural landlords, with 24% coming from large family-owned farms, and the rest being small plot and tenant farmers. However, the leadership were from that 1%, primarily the Junkers from the east Elbe region, Saxony and Pommerania. Exemplifying this control was Conrad Freiherr (Baron) von Wangenheim, a Pommeranian with extensive estates, who was chairman from 1898 to 1920. Thus the organisation favored the landlord interests as well as playing up to the interests of the actual farmers. Both the landlords and the farmers felt the shifting of political and economic power away from the land, and desired to maintain their vested interests. As a result, they worked closely with the political parties most aligned with that interest, but most especially with the Conservative Party (DKP).

By 1897 the BDL was headed by a three-member Executive Committee, one of whom was the chairman. It had a number of divisions, a speakers bureau which sent out inspirational speakers to the farming villages in the less labour-intensive winter months, an electoral division to identify candidates to support and to lobby candidates into supporting BDL initiatives, during election run-ups they had a propaganda division that provided BDL viewpoints on the candidates. There was a separate lobbying division for elected members of the Reichstag. In addition the organisation provided things like purchasing cooperatives which offered economic benefits to the members and acted as incentives to retain membership. By 1913 the BDL had over 330,000 members, employed more than 350 staff at headquarters, and approximately 400 regional workers.

The goal of the BDL was to preserve the leading position of agriculture in the economy and politics of Germany. In one of the founding documents it says: "German agriculture is the primary and most important industry, the strongest support of the empire and of the several states. To protect and strengthen agriculture is our first and most serious task because by the blossoming and flourishing of agriculture, the welfare of all professions is secured." But the BDL also came to the defense of the mom and pop shops as against big-city department store chains, they safeguarded the interests of the rural and small urban middle class, the shop assistants, rural workers, sailors and fishermen and small wine growers. Basically they took all non-industrial workers, and small businesses under their wing.