Two Hundred Years of
Midwestern Agriculture

Feature Essay

Farmers were at one time isolated in their rural locations. The automobile
and an improved network of roads have done much to change rural life.

David B. Danbom
North Dakota State University, Fargo

In 1800 the settled portions of the Midwest were overwhelmingly agricultural, and as we approach the year 2000, we recognize that agriculture continues to play an important role in the region. And yet, as we look over the past two centuries, we can see that midwestern agriculture and the rural life that revolves around it have been revolutionized.

During the early nineteenth century, the southern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were settled. The settlers were mostly people from Virginia and Kentucky, who brought with them a rural life based on strong kinship groups and evangelical Protestant churches. Free public schools, support for which was provided by the Basic Land Ordinance of 1785, played a lesser role in the early rural Midwest, but became increasingly important institutions as the nineteenth century proceeded.

Those early settlers lived mostly along the Ohio River and its tributaries. Such a settlement pattern was dictated largely by the practical necessity of marketing products at New Orleans. The products produced for transportation by flatboat and sale at New Orleans tended to be those with high value relative to volume. Pork, easily preserved by smoking or salting, wool, and wheat flour constituted the bulk of most cargoes.

An important new marketing outlet opened for midwestern farmers with the completion of the Erie Canal, which connected Buffalo, New York, and the Hudson River in 1825. By providing relatively cheap water transportation to the Great Lakes region, the Erie facilitated the settlement of Michigan and Wisconsin as well as northern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, while contributing significantly to the dynamic growth of New York City. By 1850 the upper Midwest was clearly eclipsing the lower part of the region in population and economic importance.

The importance of marketing opportunities in shaping midwestern settlement did not mean that early farmers in the region were commercial in the way modern agriculturists are. Lacking the safety net of government agricultural programs and vulnerable to natural calamities, farm families commonly practiced a "safety-first" economy that aimed at achieving maximum self-sufficiency.

As the century wore on, midwestern farmers tended to become more commercial and less self-sufficient. The development of industry and the explosive growth of cities in Europe as well as in the United States, provided growing markets for the produce of midwestern farms. The parallel expansion and improvement of the railroad system made markets more accessible to farmers and facilitated the settlement of areas—such as large portions of Iowa and Minnesota—that could not effectively use water transportation. The Civil War also played a role in stimulating commercialization, both by luring farmers into the market with high prices and by advancing mechanization, especially in the form of mechanical reapers for the harvesting of wheat and other small grains. Machinery is a capital investment that demands an income flow only commercial operations can provide.

Commercialization provided farm families with improved material standards of living, but it also increased their vulnerability to forces beyond their control. The opening of the Great Plains, for example, beat down wheat prices, leading some midwestern farmers to specialize in corn-hog production and others, such as Wisconsinites near the rapidly growing Chicago market, to concentrate on the dairy trade. Increasingly affected by such factors as fluctuating market prices, charges by middlemen, and the cost of borrowing money, commercial farmers joined interest groups. In the early 1870s, for example, as many as a half-million midwesterners flooded into the Grange, an organization that promised to solve the problems of commercial farmers with railroad regulation, cooperative buying and selling, and inflation of the money supply.

The commercialization of agriculture was accompanied by changes in rural standards of living, the rural community, and the rural self-image. Income allowed farm families to sample the fruits of industrial America, but in the process folk traditions in material culture were sacrificed. Standards of beauty and utility were set by urban designers and manufacturers and spread by such media as the press and mail-order houses, of which Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck, and Company were the most important. The increasing popularity of the mailorder merchants weakened local retailers, eroding the strength and self-sufficiency of the rural community. Urban dominance in material life was paralleled by urban cultural dominance. Standards of social value and respectability were set increasingly by America's cities. Urban life came to be seen as exciting and urban people as admirable. Conversely, rural life was increasingly portrayed as dull and backward, and rural people were defined as "rubes" and "yokels"—slow and unsophisticated people be-

Commerciatization was one result of the industrial revolution. The modern farmer generally
sells his grain to nearby elevators, and the profits are used to obtain goods and services.

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The trends of the nineteenth century reached fulfillment in the twentieth, especially in the years after 1930. The agents of change were farmers' own needs and inclinations, scientific and technological developments, and government.

Farmers continued to emphasize production for the market at the expense of self-sufficiency. Attractive new products such as the automobile made it unlikely that the trend toward greater commercialization would be substantially reversed. But the perils of the market continued, as clearly illustrated by the Great Depression of the 1930s, when farmers suffered real hardships and many lost their farms to creditors.

Government responded to the Great Depression by creating a farm program that is still with us in general outline. In order to restrict supplies and thus advance farm income, the government paid farmers to remove land from production. And in order to diminish price volatility, the government established a program to lend money on a unit basis to producers of basic commodities, such as corn and wheat. While aimed at saving "family farmers," these programs helped large commercial producers in two ways. First, they removed much of the price volatility and thus much of the risk facing commercial farmers, making it less important that they practice a diverse, safety-oriented agriculture. And second, they disproportionately rewarded the largest and most commercial producers, the people who could remove the most land from production and could produce the most under government loan programs.

Science and technology also advanced commercialization. Tractors, a rarity on midwestern farms in 1920, were virtually universal a quarter-century later, as was the range of expensive machinery adapted to tractors. Hybrid corn, introduced on a wide scale during the early 1930s, produced a dramatic increase in per-acre yields. During and after World War II an impressive chemical revolution was launched. DDT and 2,4-D were the first in a series of insecticides and herbicides that reduced the risks of nature and increased productivity. Anhydrous ammonia, a gas that liquifies when it comes in contact with the air, provided dramatically improved nitrogen fertilization and removed the necessity of rotating nitrogen-depleting crops such as corn with nitrogen-fixing ones such as alfalfa or soybeans. None of those developments was an unmixed blessing. While each increased productivity, some degraded the environment, and all of them were produced off the farm and could be purchased only with income generated at the expense of self-sufficiency.

As farming has become an increasingly sophisticated, capital-intensive, technologically oriented business, a distinctive rural life and culture has withered away. Electrification of farms, advanced dramatically by the Rural Electrification Administration beginning in 1935, wiped out the major lifestyle difference between rural and urban people. Today the distinctions between rural and urban people are decreasingly sharp and clear. They wear the same clothes, use the same products, eat the same foods, and are influenced by the same media. The distinctive institutions of the rural Midwest—the closely knit and supportive kin group, the one-room school, the open-country church, and the full-service farm village—have all largely passed away or have been altered beyond recognition.

As we face the next century, we can predict that agriculture will continue to play a role in the Midwest, but that it is unlikely ever again to define the region or to support a vigorous and indigenous style of life.

Suggested Reading

Bartlett, Richard A. The New Country: A Social History    of the American Frontier, 1776-1890. New York:    Oxford University Press, 1974. Bogue, Allan G. From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on    the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth    Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Faragher, John Mack. Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois    Prairie. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. File, Gilbert C. American Farmers: The New Minority.    Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Friedberger, Mark. Farm Families and Change in    20th-century America. Lexington: University Press of    Kentucky, 1988.

Rikoon, J. Sanford. Threshing in the Midwest, 1820-1940:    A Study of Traditional Culture and Technological    Change. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Saloutos, Theodore. The American Farmer and. the New    Deal. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1982. Schlebecker, John T. Whereby We Thrive: A History of    American Farming, 1607-1972. Allies; Iowa State    University Press, 1975. Shover, John L. First Majority-Last Minority: The    Transforming of Rural Life in America. DeKalb: Northern    Illinois University Press, 1976. Whitaker, James W., ed. Farming in the Midwest, 1840-    1900. Washington, D.C.: Agricultural History Society, 1974.

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