Читать книгу A Companion to American Agricultural History - Группа авторов - Страница 35

J. L. Anderson

The story of the rural American Midwest is one of commodities and the farms and communities that produced them. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Euro-American settlers moved west for their main chance for land seized or ceded from Native Americans. They developed farms, mills, mines, and inns, and engaged in the provisioning trade for townspeople, new arrivals, and travelers as well as more distant markets. Those who enjoyed a degree of financial success consolidated their holdings, expanded farming and processing operations, and extended credit to friends and kin as they and their children married other established families. Families that arrived soon after public lands were open for settlement took advantage of new market opportunities for growing, processing, and shipping western commodities. The Midwest was—and remains—a dynamic region, characterized by rapid population and infrastructure growth via river, road, and rail as well as widespread landownership, family farming, and market production.

Settlers built institutions such as churches and social organizations, and served in both elected and appointed offices. Geographic mobility was common in the nineteenth century, with comparatively few people persisting in place from one census to the next. Many of those who arrived early and remained consolidated social and political capital as well as land. Regardless of whether the formative Midwest of the nineteenth century was a place of unfettered opportunity, as suggested by Merle Curti in his Turnerian classic Making of an American Community, or one where growth and opportunity were carefully managed by elites, as shown by Kenneth Winkle in The Politics of Community, settlers labored for economic and social security (Curti 1959; Winkle 1988).

Those settlers arrived with prodigious cultural baggage that shaped the communities they built as well as farm production. While they adapted to local conditions, in many ways they attempted to recreate the economic and social traditions that they left behind. The Midwest, then, was not only a frontier in the traditional sense of incursion, dispossession of Native American land, and settler expansion, but it was also a meeting of several settler cultures. This chapter describes the meeting of rural cultures that emerged and how the communities that arose in the midcontinent shaped successive waves of commodity production.

Several themes run throughout the chapter. The first is the continued importance of commodity production from the origins of settlement. Economically, the region was a colony of the new nation, playing an important part in the provisioning of the eastern and southern provinces, but also for much of Europe. That emphasis on profitable commodities facilitated technological and social change. The second theme is the importance of the region’s farm production as a blending of cultures. From the development of corn varieties ideally suited to the midcontinent to the ways in which immigrants adjusted to local conditions, the region that emerged was neither North nor South, nor was it dominated by any particular ethnic group. The third theme is the diversity of production in the region. Today, observers see vast tracts of corn and soybeans, but the region was long characterized by diverse food and fiber production and, to an extent, remains a place of diverse production. The final theme is the importance of family farms in both subsistence and commodity production. While the region experienced both slavery and corporate farming, for most of its history the Midwest has been dominated by free people making a living on farms run by families. The social and economic stratification of the region, most notably seen in the division between farm owners and tenants, was profound, but its effects were muted by the shared status as family-run farms. Even today’s corporate farms are most often family corporations, organized to minimize financial and legal risk to the family.

Historians have offered various definitions of the Midwest, but for the purpose of this chapter it is defined as the twelve states of the North Central US Census region: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. This chapter only addresses developments in the eastern third of the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, with the western two thirds considered part of the Great Plains. Even truncated, this sprawling region was characterized by remarkable geophysical, political, and social diversity, the product of First Nations and settlers, northerners and southerners, and American-born and immigrant.

Of all the commodities in the region, perhaps the most important for the settlers was the land. It was the foundation upon which farm prosperity and family survival were built. There were numerous land booms before the settlement of the midcontinent, but few were more momentous for the future of the United States. It was the tension over the trans-Appalachian west, the Ohio Country, that sparked the conflict that became known as the French and Indian War. Wealthy Virginians organized the Ohio Company to speculate in western land. Their ambitions, however, collided with the conflicting land claims of France and Native Americans in the region. The Northwest Territory, organized by the newly created United States of America and which later became states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, was designed to facilitate orderly settlement of the West. Congress expected that proceeds from land sales combined with tariff revenue could fund government operations without having to engage in the kind of taxation that precipitated the American Revolution. While revenue from land sales was low in the first few years, the Government Land Office became so profitable that the expression to “do a land-office business” entered the lexicon as a synonym for brisk trade and profitability (Rohrbough 1968).

The value of the land for farming varied widely across the public domain, but for the purposes of transferring government land into private hands, Congress set a minimum price of $1.25 per acre in 1800. Congress granted significant exceptions for speculators to purchase large tracts at deeply discounted prices. This was intended to generate much-needed revenue and to encourage speculators to take on the work of managing all the smaller transactions with those who would farm the land. The $1.25 minimum price became the real price for most of this land because settlers would not pay more for a tract when there was so much land available at the minimum price. Speculators formed combinations to protect each other and prevent inflation of land prices by reducing competition ahead of the public auction. Starting in the 1820s, settlers did the same thing, forming claim associations or claim clubs to protect their claims from competition from speculators or outsiders. When the Land Office auctions proceeded, settlers were present not only to bid on their claims but also to protect the claims of club members through intimidation (Gates 1968).

Contemporary critics sometimes decried speculators as profiteers and parasites, a position echoed by many historians. While this was likely true in some cases, with speculators holding out for unreasonably high prices and rushing to foreclose on vulnerable farmers, it was not the whole story. Following the panic of 1819, which resulted in significant default by land purchasers, the government set the minimum price per acre at $1.25 in 1820, but extended no credit. Even at this rate a farm was beyond the reach of many land-hungry settlers. Speculators, though, extended credit, actually easing the path to ownership for many working farm families, even if the price per acre was higher than that of government land. Furthermore, rather than pressing the farmers who faced hardship from low prices or crop failures, most of the creditors were careful to press not too hard for repayment, preferring flexibility over a hard line (Bogue 1955; Swierenga 1968).

The farmers who obtained access to land, either by renting or owning, brought their culture with them that shaped commodity production in the region. Many scholars have emphasized that the most important cultural contact was that of North and South. Southerners of the mid-eighteenth century desired access to western lands across the Appalachians, with influential Virginians organizing the Ohio Company of Virginia to block French expansionism through trade with Native Americans and settlement along the tributaries of the Ohio River. The Cumberland Gap became a funnel for southern settlers into the Ohio Valley. At the northern end of Ohio, by contrast, Connecticut’s Western Reserve was an entry point for New England Yankees, a gateway that only widened with the completion of the Erie Canal. Southerner and Yankee would coexist and vie for ascendency in the midcontinent, finding expression in debates over slavery, internal improvements, and education (Power 1953; Gray 1996).

Despite the tension and conflict between northerner and southerner in the region, neither triumphed; the Midwest was something new. In the language of the mid-nineteenth century, inhabitants of the Old Northwest became westerners. They were the products of both North and South as well as the many cultures of Northern Europe, the British Isles, Scandinavia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, forming a region dedicated to republican government and market production (Etcheson 1996).

Long before there was a United States, however, Europeans looked to the region as a granary. French settlers in Louisiana, dedicated to sugar cane production and processing, looked northward for food. They sent colonists north along the Mississippi and its tributaries, establishing an agricultural colony called the Illinois Country that provided food and fiber crops to the plantations in the sugar parishes and to the residents of New Orleans. Settlers at Kaskaskia, Ste. Genevieve, and other points lived in villages, practicing long-lot agriculture as they had in France (Ekberg 1998).

Cultural geographer John C. Hudson claimed that multiple cultural hearths contributed to the swath of the Midwest that earned the moniker “Corn Belt” due to the importance of raising corn primarily for livestock as well as for the market. The location of Hudson’s hearths include the Scioto and Miami River Valleys of central and Southwestern Ohio and north central Kentucky’s Bluegrass region, extending south to the Pennyroyal Plateau of south-central Kentucky and northern Tennessee, as well as Tennessee’s Central Basin. These areas, Hudson contended, were home to people who relied on corn and forage for fattening livestock and who brought their agricultural practices to the Old Northwest, marking the region as a leader in corn, cattle, and hog production (Hudson 1994).

One of the dominant economic activities in the region, regardless of cultural background, was a commitment to raising corn, the region’s most iconic crop. It thrived in the region’s long and hot summer days and warm nights, with a growing season of approximately five frost-free months and annual rainfall of 40 inches or so. It also underwent multiple transformations in the midcontinent that reflected the blending of North and South. Beginning in the eighteenth century, according to botanists Edgar Anderson and William L. Brown, short-season flint corn of the Yankee met the long-season southern gourdseed corn, resulting in a hardy, 100-day corn that became widely grown and known as “corn belt yellow dent” by the 1870s. The combination of the softer gourdseed and the hard flints resulted in a corn that was soft enough for livestock to consume without grinding but hard enough to store and transport, if needed. While countless farmers engaged in this kind of corn crossing, open-pollinated corn (either deliberately or inadvertently), Robert Reid of Illinois most famously developed the variety known as “Reid’s Yellow Dent” in the 1840s. Reid planted a late-maturing yellow corn, and when some hills failed to germinate planted those with an early red variety. Reid saved seed from that crop and continued to propagate it for decades without introducing any new varieties. The resulting yellow dent matured between 90 and 110 days, had 16–22 rows of kernels per ear, and could yield up to 40 bushels per acre in optimal conditions. It was a Corn Belt triumph (Anderson and Brown 1952; Hudson 1994; Olmstead and Rhode 2008). The rise of the Corn Belt dent demonstrates not only the importance of environmental conditions, mechanization, transportation, demand, and market access in commodity production, but that the goals and cultural background of the settlers were also critical.

One of the most extreme examples of culture shaping production was the settlement of southerners along the Missouri River counties in the central part of the state. There, they recreated the plantations of their home region, utilizing enslaved African Americans to raise the tobacco, hemp, and livestock culture of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. The rich bottom lands and rolling hills were later dubbed “Little” Dixie” in recognition of the persistence of southern culture (Hurt 1992).

Studies of small communities provide a finer-grained examination of these dynamics of culture and agriculture. Sugar Creek, located in Sangamon County, Illinois, was largely settled by native-born southerners who forged a community in which collective action through kin and neighborhood mattered at least as much, if not more so, as that of the individual. Chain migration characterized much of the settlement, with kin following kin in to mobilize social capital. In Sugar Creek and thousands of other free-labor communities like it, men and women cooperated to raise crops, livestock, and children. They confronted a world of increasing market integration, fueled by the growth of railroads and Civil War. Market integration generally rewarded those who were able to invest in new tools and expansion, leaving the Sugar Creek of the 1870s far more divided by wealth than it had been in the 1820s (Faragher 1986).

In contrast to Sugar Creek, Yankees dominated in Kalamazoo County, Michigan while Fountain Green township of Western Illinois was a mix of southerner, Yankee, and Scots-Irish from the Mid-Atlantic states. Even so, families who made farms in these areas faced similar conditions of farm making and market access that resembled those of Sugar Creek. Families met much of their own needs, but market production of wheat and livestock also played an important part in sustaining the farm. During and after the Civil War, these communities were transformed. The war was a catalyst for economic growth and economic stratification (Faragher 1986; Gray 1996; Rugh 2001).

In Indiana’s hill country, consisting of the southernmost counties closest to the Ohio River, the unglaciated, forested landscape became home to a wave of southern settlers from the upland South and, to a lesser extent, the Mid-Atlantic states. Ultimately, German Catholics also made homes in the region, contributing to a conservative pattern of safety-first agriculture, marked by low rates of mechanization and modest market production. Only after the massive railroad expansion of the 1850s and the price boom of the Civil War years did hill country market production start to catch up to that of central Indiana with its better rail connections (Nation 2005; Salstrom 2007).

The rural Midwest also became a home for African Americans who fled the South. In the aftermath of Gabriel’s, Vesey’s and Nat Turner’s rebellions, southern state legislatures made it increasingly difficult for free African Americans to stay in the South. Those who were manumitted or purchased their freedom confronted new laws that required leaving the state or forfeiting their freedom. Many of those who left made homes in the rural Midwest. In Indiana, the Roberts and Beech settlements proved to be havens from the 1830s through the 1850s. Residents experienced economic opportunity through the possibility of land ownership, commerce, and labor for neighboring white family farms. Farm production in these settlements reflected both the desire for meeting household needs and the market, with larger farmers more market oriented than those with small acreages. These settlers built their own churches, schools, and social organizations in the face of racial animus that intensified during and after the Civil War (Vincent 1999).

After the initial years of settlement, successive waves of foreign-born settlers arrived in the region, building communities characterized by a strong ethnic identity. The lure of the rural Midwest was the availability of ample land to recreate communities from the homeland. Immigrants hoped to avoid the secularization of life in the mother country that threatened parental control and to enhance their economic position or, at the very least, stave off decline. In the Midwest, these two concerns could be addressed at the same time. The religious and social order that was threatened in Europe and Scandinavia could be replicated in the Midwest with minimal interference. In the midcontinent, immigrants could enjoy maximum living space thanks to an ample supply of comparatively inexpensive land, low taxes, and the lack of an established state church or compulsory military service. American freedom for these groups was the freedom to recreate the Old Country, favoring the Midwest over the slaveholding South, where opportunity through land ownership was limited by slave-owning elites.

Once established, immigrant island communities grew apace due to chain migration, creating a mutually reinforcing cycle by which an individual or family follows another family member to the same location. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was Germans and Irish, soon followed by waves of Dutch, Scandinavian, and Finnish settlers. Immigration from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire, most notably Czechs, surged again in the late nineteenth century. The timing of each group’s arrival often coincided with various opportunities for low-skilled work. For the Irish of the 1840s and 1850s, it was canal and railroad construction. The Danes of the late 1860s also worked on the railroads, while the Finns and Scandinavians who arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often found employment in logging in Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

The farm settlements and agricultural practices of the Old Country were not forgotten in America, but there was widespread adaptation to local market pressures and opportunities, just as there had been for native-born settlers. Many immigrants were astounded by the scale of American farms, the new crops, and the new and different landscape, not to mention the importance of hired labor and mechanization. The land that many of them left was characterized by small farms, with little reliance on hired labor and machines, and intensive farming practices prevailing over extensive ones. Still, immigrants rapidly took to cash crops such as wheat and feed crops such as corn, adopting what had been either marginal or non-existent crops in their homelands. In the first few years of settlement, many immigrants out-Yankeed their native-born counterparts by dedicating even more land to cash crops such as wheat due to the frequent high returns on the crop. Soon, though, they tended to diversify even more than native-born farmers, farming more as they had in the Old Country. Practices that had been abandoned in the farm-making years actually reappeared, representing a sort of cultural rebound in which these farmers brought crops such as rye and flax back into their operations (Baltensperger 1980; Gjerde 1985; Ostergren 1988).

For many of these ethnic communities, religious faith and patriarchy served as a bulwark against the worldliness of both secular culture and the culture of those from other denominations. This was the case in Block, Kansas, where German Lutherans maintained a distinct community through intermarriage, schools, and the church (Coburn 1992). Dutch Reformed communities near Holland, Michigan, and in Pella and Orange City, Iowa, were also able to preserve distinctive communities centered on faith, with strict controls on behavior beyond the church walls. The persistence of European language over several generations was a hallmark of the region. People in ethnic communities everywhere in America continued to speak and write in their traditional language, but in the Midwest the opening of land for settlement coincided with waves of immigration and allowed these cultural islands the space and time to develop and persist. Robert Ostergren’s (1988) and Jon Gjerde’s (1985) studies of Scandinavian immigrants demonstrated the continuity of church membership and language over multiple generations in the Midwest.

Patrimony, the practice of handing down the family farm, was a big part of the success of rural ethnic groups in maintaining community discipline and continuity. Many immigrants from northern Europe and their descendants practiced primogeniture, passing down the farm intact to the oldest son. Keeping the farm intact meant material and social security for parents. The intact farm meant that the oldest male could marry and carry on important cultural traditions. Parents often remained with the children in their retirement, comfortable and secure. This stood in contrast to the practices of native-born Americans, often referred to as Yankees by members of these ethnic communities. Yankees practiced partible inheritance, in which the estates were divided equally among the children. This often meant breaking up the farm if the descendants could not agree on buying out a sibling or if parents did not have enough other property to provide for the other children. As a practical matter, partible inheritance was more likely to result in farms changing hands and more geographic mobility, which made it difficult to sustain traditional cultural practices. Immigrant farmers, however, continued to practice primogeniture over multiple generations, ensuring the maintenance of communities that were closer knit with kinship ties than those of native-born families (Pederson 1992; Salamon 1992).

Despite the successes in providing a patrimony, it was more difficult to sustain insular faith communities. School reform and consolidation was a major cultural conflict in the rural Midwest. Progressive Era reformers believed that farmers were not sophisticated enough to meet America’s growing demands for food and fiber. They wanted educational reform in the form of vocational agriculture and home economics courses and graded schools and consolidated high schools to teach those subjects. The old one-room school had been fine for many people who were going to be farmers in previous generations, but promoters of new scientific agriculture wanted more training for rural youth. But those reformers ran headlong into the opposition of many ethnic communities, often Catholic. For them, education beyond what we would consider eighth grade was superfluous. Consolidation of school districts and the creation of graded schools meant a loss of family authority for many first- and second-generation immigrants (Reynolds 1999).

World War I brought nativist backlash against German-Americans as well as other Euro-American hyphenated identities. In many places it meant the end for the foreign language in the press and from the pulpit. Most famously, Iowa Governor Clyde Herring issued the Babel Proclamation in May 1918, requiring English only in all schools and churches, not to mention all public conversation on the streets, in trains, and on telephones. Local Councils of National Defense questioned the loyalty of first- and second-generation German immigrants, often resulting in intimidation to purchase war bonds, threats, and violence. Most notoriously, in Luverne, Minnesota, farmer John Meintz was accused of disloyalty, beaten, threatened with death, and tarred and feathered.

Nativism, school consolidation, and growing consumer culture and the worldliness of automobiles, cigarettes, and Hollywood contributed to the breakdown of rural immigrant communities. The Ku Klux Klan and “100 percent Americanism” brought further challenges. Even so, however, in some rural midwestern neighborhoods German was spoken into the 1930s. World War II delivered the final blow. In Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, and in Block, Kansas, rural ethnic communities disintegrated with the geographic dislocations of military service and work in defense industries as well as the rise of mass consumer culture and media, and intermarriage outside the community (Coburn 1992; Pederson 1992).

Even communities that were settled and dominated by Anglo-Americans were in decline. The lure of cities for employment and the attractions of anonymity mattered to the descendants of these pioneers, too. In southern Illinois’s Union County, an area profoundly influenced by southern culture, markets for locally produced commodities, such as eggs, dairy, and truck crops, faded, with Union County farmers not able to match those areas with larger scale and better access to transportation. In Union County, farm income fell in relation to that from other sources, not least of which was the government (Adams 1994).

Between the pull factors drawing people from farm communities and the push factors driving them off, neighborhoods were redefined. Small town business that had sold farmers groceries, machinery parts, and other goods and services collapsed or centralized. Farm and small town families traveled to the nearest Walmart, Tractor Supply, or implement dealer at the county seat town (Davies 1998; Flora and Flora 2014). Cold War defense spending, wartime revolutions in food processing, and the growth of the white-collar sector meant that more jobs required a college degree. Improved access to post-secondary education, due in large part to the GI Bill, resulted in the departure of sons and daughters for the region’s colleges and universities and, for many, a life off the farm or away from the hometown.

Decline was also a theme for the region’s African American farm communities. As early as 1900, African American settlements were struggling. The descendants of the settler generation confronted rapidly rising land prices, making it difficult to expand operations or to break into farming. Like many rural Americans, those in Indiana’s Beech and Roberts settlements saw more opportunity in cities than on the farm (Vincent 1999). Black farmers who remained on the land found new obstacles to success. While legally color blind, the US Department of Agriculture was plagued by systemic racism that either shortchanged black farmers or left them out of commodity and conservation programs, crop insurance, loans and other services that supported income and farm survival (Reid 2014). As the rural cultural landscape flattened, so, too, did the commodity landscape.

For most white settlers and their descendants, however, the region was one characterized by a modest degree of equality. The Midwest was free of sharecropping and the crop lien. In much of the nineteenth century, tenancy in the region often functioned as a ladder to farm ownership, with young farmers represented more frequently among tenants and older farmers more likely to own land (Cogswell 1975; Winters 1978; Winters 1990). Later, rising land values made it more difficult to break into farming, reinforcing the social and economic hierarchy.

For the early settlers in the midcontinent, corn for cattle feeding for eastern markets was an early commodity wave that sustained both small and large farmers. The origins of these practices were found in several of the cultural hearths identified by John C. Hudson, with the addition of West-central Illinois. Smallholders could sell one or more animals to large-scale operators who opened large feedlots to put pounds on the animals. These cattle feeders planted large tracts of corn, typically in 10-acre fields. After shocking the corn in the fall, they turned in approximately 100 cattle per field, rotating animals through to fatten them to the desired weight before driving large herds to river cities such as St. Louis or along the National Road such as Indianapolis, Indiana, and Columbus, Ohio. In the decades before the Civil War, cattle drives from the midcontinent over the mountains were common, with ready markets in New York City and multiple points in Pennsylvania, including Erie, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia (Bogue 1959; Henlein 1959; Hudson 1994).

Hog production thrived as part of this cattle feeding system. Those early cattle ranchers who accumulated the large herds put hogs in the lots as cattle fed or even after the cattle, allowing hogs to glean the corn that the cattle left and consume what passed undigested through the cattle. Those hogs, while sometimes driven eastward over the mountains, were more often driven to river towns after fall fattening. There, nascent packers utilized the cold weather and empty warehouses (vacant because the goods had been distributed to country stores after the rivers froze), and surplus labor to transform hogs into meat, lard, and by-products. When the rivers opened in the spring, the packed pork was shipped downstream to New Orleans, where it was subsequently trans-shipped to other American port cities or to Europe (Walsh 1982; Cronon 1991; Hurt 1998a ; Anderson 2019).

This process of transforming golden corn into beef and pork laid the foundation for the post-Civil War wave of fattening Texas cattle. The cattle trails that led northward from Texas first passed through Missouri to Chicago, and later to famed cattle towns such as Abilene, Dodge City, and Ogallala. There, the cattle were shipped via rail to Midwestern points, where farmers found it profitable to purchase range-fed Texas cattle and fatten them with corn (Whitaker 1975; Cronon 1991).

Yet Midwestern livestock production was more than cattle and hogs. Horse breeding for racing and light draft work was more significant than for the farm, given the comparatively small size of early nineteenth-century horses. But the importation of European breeds, such as the Percheron starting in the late 1830s and in significant numbers in the 1850s, fueled regional growth in horse breeding. Missouri mules, first bred for the Santa Fe trade in the 1820s and 1830s, became famous across the South by the late nineteenth century. Planters relied on mules rather than horses because many of them believed that only mules could withstand rough handling by enslaved people. This prejudice continued after the demise of slavery and explains, in part, the importance of mules in the transition to sharecropping and tenancy in the cotton-producing states and the role of midwestern farmers in sustaining the cotton economy. (Ashton 1924; Bogue 1963; Jones 1983)

Sheep production, while never rivaling the importance of midwestern cattle, hogs, or draft animals, was a regular feature of farming across the region. Another legacy of northern farming, sheep required closer attention than hogs or cattle and were at risk on the open range that characterized much of the South. The settlement of the Midwest coincided with the beginning of the Merino craze, a mania for the superb fleece of Spanish sheep. Merinos were first imported into Vermont in 1802 and spread rapidly throughout the Northeast (Jones 1983). In Wisconsin, as the fortunes of wheat farming waned due to soil exhaustion, farmers turned to sheep, increasing the size of their flocks. In general, however, western farmers did not practice the kind of careful sheep husbandry that was typical of the Northeast. Poor feed and the lack of winter shelter were common complaints before 1860. During the Civil War, government demand for wool boosted prices and spurred production across the region as well as growth in the number of carding and woolen mills (Bogue 1963; Lampard 1963; Crockett 1970; Jones 1983).

Northern influences also included commercial dairying, an artifact from New England and the Mid-Atlantic. Butter production was common across the region from the early days of midwestern settlement, reflecting the tradition of diversified northern farms. Local shopkeepers purchased and collected farm-produced butter and then sold it in urban markets. Dairy for commercial cheesemaking reflected Yankee culture. The Western Reserve of Ohio became an early cheese-producing area, later challenged by Yankee farmers near Columbus. In Wisconsin and northern Illinois, New Yorkers influenced the course of dairying by importing their expertise and practices from the leading dairy state in the nation (Lampard 1963; Jones 1983).

During the early to mid-nineteenth century, a wave of wheat production moved across the region, extending from the Mid-Atlantic region and following the opening of new land for settlement. Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana, supplanted New York and Pennsylvania as leading wheat producers. Both winter and spring varieties were often grown on prairie and newly cleared land following an initial year or two of corn production. Wheat was a reliable cash crop for many farmers, with ready markets in local communities as well as New Orleans or New York, especially after the completion of the Erie Canal that resulted in lower transportation costs (Lewis 2002; Salstrom 2007). By the 1860s, wheat production surged in the more westerly states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa. A pastor at Cottage Grove, Minnesota, noted in 1866 that “Nothing interests the people of this community more than the price of wheat” and in 1861 a Wisconsin newspaper had proclaimed that “Wheat is King, and Wisconsin is the center of the Empire” (Jarchow 1949; Ross 1951; Lampard 1963).

By the 1870s, farmers in the Dakota Territories, Nebraska, and Kansas were emerging as important producers. In particular, the Red River Valley of North Dakota and Minnesota experienced a wheat farming bonanza. A crash in the Northern Pacific Railroad stock price led promoters to trade deflated bonds for land in hopes of sparking settlement which would, in turn, restore value to the railroad. A handful of investors began large-scale mechanized farming, sustained by a large contingent of seasonal labor to assist with the harvest and threshing. While there were never many bonanza farms, perhaps no more than 100, global media turned attention not only to the region but also to the viability of highly mechanized farming (Drache 1964).

Mechanization became a hallmark of the region. While corn harvesting resisted mechanization in the nineteenth century, machines for corn planting and cultivating, wheat seeding and harvesting, and threshing small grains were developed in the antebellum period and became commonplace after the Civil War. While mechanization resulted in only modest productivity gains on the farm before the war, largely due to the comparatively small number of machines in use, limits on farm size, and improved acreage, the technology of the mid-century promised to permit production to scale up in subsequent years. By 1900, farmers could do much of their field work while sitting down (Bogue 1963; Atack and Bateman 1987). Some farmers were slow to mechanize and there was even resistance to mechanization. Throughout the region, farm laborers resented being supplanted and deskilled by mechanical harvesters. In some cases, they threatened to burn or destroy machines, barns, and stacks of unthreshed grain (Argersinger and Argersinger 1984).

Settlers who occupied the public domain concerned themselves with improvement, traditionally understood as erecting buildings and fences and bringing land into cultivation. But there was one significant obstacle for many farmers in realizing the potential of the investment in farm land: drainage. There were millions of acres of these marshy lands in a broad arc encircling the Great Lakes and extending beyond the Red River Valley of the North, through central Iowa across Illinois and Indiana and extending into central Ohio. This part of the region was scrubbed flat and was subsequently known as the wet prairie. Early settlers simply lived with the fact that much of their farmland, in some cases as much as 40 percent, was not arable. They could graze it or cut prairie hay from it in late summer, but it was not viable for the farm family to excavate extensive drainage ditches or dig the trenches to lay a system of ceramic drain tiles (Prince 1997).

In the late nineteenth century, however, rising land prices put more pressure on farmers to develop this land. There was new steam-powered equipment available as well as more available laborers, lessening the pressure on the family. Provided 60 percent of farmers in the affected area approved, local drainage districts could be organized, each authorized to develop drainage plans, levy fees, and incur debt to implement those plans. While many drainage districts were financial failures and, where drainage succeeded there was a decline in biodiversity, the net result was a gain of millions of acres in arable land by 1930, much of it given over to corn, oats, and hay. As the old ceramic drain lines have broken over the years since tiling, farmers have turned to perforated plastic pipe to keep the land productive for the crops that pay the bills (Prince 1997).

While corn growing, livestock feeding and breeding, and dairy have been the iconic Midwestern commodities, the region’s record of diversity in commodity production is a defining trait. The Midwest, in comparison to much of the country, saw a much greater degree of diversification in commodity production. This is not to assert that other regions did not have diverse household and market production; rather, it means that farmers in the midcontinent had multiple paths to profit, often on one farm. Southern commodity agriculture was long dominated by cotton, tobacco, and, for a brief period and to a lesser degree, hemp. The states of the arid West were characterized by wheat and other cereals. New England farm profits were often driven by dairy, and while the Mid-Atlantic region had a tradition of diversified farming, the profit centers on those farms were often truck farming for nearby urban markets and canneries or fluid milk production. The Pacific Northwest was readily recognizable as fruit country. Only California rivaled or exceeded the Midwest in terms of diversity, a fact that may well reflect the midwestern roots of so many California farmers as much as its climate.

Midwestern farmers took advantage of excellent soil and optimal growing conditions in the midcontinent to develop extensive vegetable farming operations. Vegetable crops, long raised in truck patches strictly for local markets, expanded acreage with the rise of the canning industry after the Civil War. Production of tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, beets, asparagus, peas, pumpkin, and sweet corn for canning surged, starting in the 1870s. By the 1910s, Atlantic, Iowa, boasted of having the largest corn canning factory in the world, processing multiple crops and operating around the clock when vegetables were in season. At that time there were dozens of other such facilities in Iowa and hundreds more throughout the region. Canneries, however, faced stiff competition during their comparatively short season, with problems of operating capital, frequent breakdowns, and quality control issues making it difficult for most of them to survive (Goldberg 1995; Oden 2004; Smith-Howard 2014).

Orchard crops and viticulture were once staples of the midwestern farm economy. While many farms had orchards for home fruit supply and cider, before World War II midwestern fruit met not only local demand but was exported beyond the region. Much of this production, however, was no longer viable after World War II. The use of selective herbicides such as 2,4-D resulted in a widespread problem, with herbicide drift damaging trees and killing broad leaf fruit vines in regions with significant corn production. In Michigan, north of the Corn Belt, cherry production surged after World War II, with mechanization displacing hand labor, starting in the 1960s (Anderson 2009; Smith-Howard 2014).

Many other crops flourished in the Midwest, providing farmers with multiple paths to prosperity. The seed industry flourished, especially before World War II, with northwest Missouri producing large quantities of bluegrass seed for hay crops until being displaced by growers in the Pacific Northwest. The business of hybrid seed corn production to prepare millions of bushels of commercial seed corn provided reliable income in the years after World War II for thousands of farmers. Even mint production was a regular feature of production agriculture in Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin. The extract from the peppermint plant was used in the manufacture of chewing gum, candy, toothpaste, and medicine. Persistent fungus problems and cheaper production in Washington’s irrigated Yakima Valley resulted in the declining importance of midwestern mint (Smith-Howard 2014).

One of the Midwest’s notable secondary crops was the sugar beet, thanks to surging global sugar demand in the early twentieth century. Much of the acreage dedicated to this crop in the region was located in Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, and Nebraska. Early growers relied on locally available European immigrants for labor but, by World War II, increasingly relied on the migrant labor pool that had come north from Mexico to work in the vegetable fields and railroads. Growers could pay the Mexican workers less and found that relying on outsiders made it easier to combat nascent unionization efforts. With the labor shortages of World War II, the US government-organized Bracero program met these needs, further enhancing the reliance on Mexican labor in midwestern beet fields. The US embargo of Cuban sugar in 1960 increased the demand for beet sugar as well as the reliance on Mexican laborers (Valdes 1991; Norris 2014; Smith-Howard 2014).

World War II initiated a significant period of reorganization of the farm. Historians Dennis Nordin and Roy Scott described it as a period of heightened entrepreneurialism. While many farmers in the region had long been associated with technological mastery, postwar conditions removed many of the restraints that had held back production (Brinkman and Hirsch 2017). The period brought new implements that were specifically designed for farm tractors, permitting broader application of the investment in tractor horsepower. Labor shortages and the spread of rural electrification meant more use of electric motors for materials handling. Antibiotics for the treatment of illness and injury kept more animals alive, while the use of subtherapeutic antibiotics in feed permitted faster gains and conversion of feed to flesh (Finlay 2004; Nordin and Scott 2005; Anderson 2009). Hybrid seed corn, introduced in the 1920s, had made rapid gains in acreage during the 1930s and 1940s, becoming a nearly universally used technology in the region by war’s end (Fitzgerald 1990; Olmstead and Rhode 2008). New hybrids were designed for the shorter growing seasons of Wisconsin and Minnesota, with other hybrids developed to resist pests such as the European corn borer (Hudson 1994; Anderson, 2009).

One of the most important changes was the abandonment of the crop rotations that were pioneered in the late nineteenth century. Those crop rotations limited the draw on soil nutrients and prevented a buildup of pathogens and insects or weed species. Wartime industrial expansion in ammonium nitrate production for ordnance and research in growth-regulator herbicides and chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides brought changes to Corn Belt farms. Eventually, farmers jettisoned their 5-year rotation due to the availability of these new farm chemicals. The oats and hay that they raised to feed draft animals was no longer needed, although the hay crop remained important for many livestock feeders. New machines such as corn picker-shellers and combines for small grains, and ultimately a combine adapted for corn, meant an abandonment of community-based threshing and the tedious season of hand corn picking. Liberated from these harvest bottlenecks and armed with new farm chemicals, farmers simultaneously industrialized and simplified their farm landscapes (Anderson 2009; Smith-Howard 2014).

Farmers in the Midwest also committed to changes in livestock raising. Despite the growing importance of pure-bred animals during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, most livestock marketed from the region were grades or cross-bred animals. It was common practice to purchase a blooded boar or to bring in a pure-bred bull for service in a mixed breed herd. Yet over the course of the twentieth century a growing percentage of farms raised blooded stock. The increased investment for pure-bred animals and the growing costs of crop production due to purchased inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides induced farmers to adopt new models: feedlots and confinement.

In the pasture system, cattle and hogs move to the feed, grazing large tracts of forage crops or even standing corn. Farmers could supplement the diet of pastured animals with corn or minerals, but animals ate at their own pace. Bringing cattle onto a feedlot meant moving the feed to the animals, which meant dedicating more land to high-fiber and carbohydrate-rich feeds. Similarly, putting hogs into confinement barns allowed the farmer to provide a carefully calibrated diet suited to the stage in the animals’ life cycle. Concrete or metal slatted floors meant no more trampling feed into the dirt. Furthermore, with closer confinement, it was relatively easier to monitor health conditions, especially for animals at vulnerable stages of the life cycle, such as gestational sows, piglets, and shoats. It was also easier to control the environment through heating or cooling, maximizing the potential uptake of nutrients and calories. Hot animals are often listless and do not eat, while cold animals use much of their caloric intake to stay warm (Finlay 2004; Anderson 2009).

Dairy farmers in the region were also quick to adopt new barns, milking parlors, and bulk handling systems. Stricter postwar health standards for the Grade A fluid milk that ended up delivered to stoops and in grocers’ cases were powerful push factors for adopting new techniques. With less labor at home, farmers who kept just a few cows for cream production got out of the business altogether. The farmers who stayed in production-built barns with “loose-housing” rather than prescribed stalls for each animal. They no longer milked at the stall while seated on the old milking stool; rather they milked in specially designed parlors with a recessed floor so that sanitary preparation of the udder and teats as well as electric-powered milkers could be performed with less stooping. Instead of dumping the fresh milk into cans by hand, glass tubes and vacuum power carried the milk into a large refrigerated tank for pick up in bulk trucks. Dairy production increased dramatically with the adoption of artificial insemination, which allowed farmers to draw on the most favorable genetics for their herds (Anderson 2009; Smith-Howard 2013).

Thanks to many of these new seeds, chemicals, tools, and techniques, farmers could cultivate more acres and take care of more animals with family labor. Land values increased in the postwar period as farmers hurried to spread these new fixed costs over more acres in the hopes of boosting farm income, a problem that was compounded by stagnant commodity prices. It was, as economist Willard Cochrane explained, a production treadmill; once on the treadmill, it required continued and ever more exertion to stay on, also making it difficult to get off (Anderson 2009).

By the early twenty-first century, both the farm landscape and rural society were simultaneously simpler and more complicated than they had been over the previous 200 years. They were simpler because there was less diversity in crop production, fewer farms with both crops and livestock, and fewer people and distinct communities. Yet they were also more complicated because those remaining farmers were more reliant on costly technological and scientific inputs that made farming more complex than ever, not to mention access to credit and the vagaries of markets. Family-sized units have been eclipsed, with a growing share of production controlled by a small number of entities that either contract with family farms or compete with them. Large-scale producers consolidated production and pushed many family farms out, even as much of the land was still owned by families. The ethnic and cultural backgrounds that once gave farming in the Midwest some variety have also receded. While elements of those cultures remain, most often enshrined in community festivals celebrating ethnic heritage, distinctive rural communities have faded. The physical and cultural landscapes that remain have been flattened.