The Secret Behind the U. S. Corn Belt

It is a truism of American history:  The farmland of the Midwest was so rich that when the railroad and mechanical farm equipment arrived the region became the  breadbasket of the nation.

Yes, the “amazing fertility of the prairies” provides food for the entire country—and much of the world.[1]

However, it took more than railroads and the McCormick reaper.

In his book Nature’s Metropolis historian William Cronon hints at the problem facing a pioneering farmer in Missouri or Illinois in the early 19^th century. “[The] flatness of the prairies subjected lowland areas to bad drainage and flooding.” An 1831 guide for newly-arrived farmers warned them to select their land carefully—flat land that looked good in the dry season could become a swamp when the rains came.[2]

In other words, what we romantically call wetlands (and often try to preserve) were the bane of the agricultural pioneer in the Midwest. “Farmers tried to settle far enough from floodplains and wet prairies to avoid bad drainage, but they also needed to be near enough to a stream course to obtain supplies of wood and water,” writes Cronon.  [3]

As long as there was a lot of land for sale, farmers could cope—often it “was cheaper to buy a new farm than to drain the farm one already owned,” one historian wrote in 1909. [4]

But it wasn’t until prairies could be efficiently drained of water that midwestern agriculture came into its own and the rich Corn Belt materialized. That process of draining wetlands began in the second half of the 19th century—and it continues today. It is estimated that when the colonists arrived in New England, there were 215 million acres of wetlands in the continental United States; by 2019 well over half, 124 million acres, had been drained.[5]

One of History’s Success Stories 

A new paper by North Carolina State University economists Eric Edwards and Walter Thurman probes into the difficulties—not just physical but organizational—of turning those wetlands into productive farmland.[6] This is one of history’s success stories and we should explore what made it work.

But first, a note about geography. The nation has two main areas of swampy land: the glacially-created northern Midwest and the coastal areas along the southern Mississippi River and in the Southeast. Efforts to drain the swamps were less successful in the latter areas, because priority was given to controlling Mississippi River flooding and it was hard to drain near-sea-level flatland. Also, perhaps the economic value of drained prairies was more obvious, as Chicago-based railroads offered new markets for grain.

In the Midwest (one focus of the Edwards and Thurman paper), innovations had to occur in “drainage institutions, engineering, and tile manufacture” for progress to be made. [7]

So let’s go back to 1820 or so when farmers started digging ditches to drain the land. It took too much labor,  and the big trenches sacrificed land that could have been used for growing. By the mid-century, however, farmers began using clay tiles to create underground tunnels that collected water and sent it to more distant ditches without disturbing soil or plants. By 1859, the nation had 66 tile factories. [8]

The Difficulty of Draining Wet Soil

But who had the money to drain hundreds or thousands of acres? Most farms were small (150 acres was typical). And once the water moved into off-site ditches and canals, there had to be some kind of cooperation among the owners of those ditches and canals. Drained water could overflow a downstream ditch and pour water on the land of a neighboring farmer. Or if the downstream farmer failed to keep his ditch clean, it could block water that would then inundate the upstream farmer’s land.

Congress was well aware of what it viewed as the “useless lands” problem. [9] Between 1849 and 1869 it passed three Swamp Land Acts. Essentially, the government handed wetlands (85 million acres in total) over to the states.

Then, most of the lands devolved to the counties.

But it wasn’t until the creation of “drainage districts,” special districts that brought together multiple farmers in a legal arrangement, that the drainage problem began to be solved. A special district is “parallel and not subordinate to that of county and municipal government, but is subordinate to state governments,” say Edwards and Thurman.  Districts “allow landowners to retain rights to operate their properties at the scale and for the purposes that economic factors dictate, while ceding one property right ‘stick’ to a local elected body.”[10]

Special Districts Were the Key

Special districts may not sound so innovative today. We are used to special districts that tax themselves for goals such as irrigation, urban development, parks, etc. But it took a while to figure out that states, counties, and municipalities were not the right vehicles for getting rid of “swamp lands.”

For one thing, in the 1840s eight states defaulted on their bonds. Others—New York and Ohio—barely managed to hang on. Most of those bonds were invested in public works like railroads and canals that failed—and then land values and state taxes revenues dropped dramatically. [11]

One result was that the states got out of the public investment business. And they kept municipalities out of the business, too. [12]

Beginning with Ohio in 1859 and concluding with South Carolina in 1912, states passed laws allowing the creation of drainage districts. Edwards and Thurman estimate that drainage districts increased the value of the wettest lands by 31 to 37 percent, and the less swampy land by 24 to 30 percent. Among their sample of states, that meant an increase of $16.98 billion (in 2020 dollars).[13]

And the result was farmland that is feeding the world.

Notes

[1] The quoted phrase comes from a classic history text: Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, and William E. Leuchtenberg, The Growth of the American Republic Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 583.

[2] William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 102.

[3] Cronon, 102.

[4] Tom W. Smurr,  A Treatise on the Law of Farm Drainage (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1909), 2.

[5] Eric C. Edwards and Walter N. Thurman, Creating American Farmland: Institutional Evolution and the Development of Agricultural Drainage. Unpublished manuscript, January 12, 2023, 2.

[6] Edwards and Thurman.

[7] Edwards and Thurman, 2.

[8] Edwards and Thurman, 5.

[9] This term was used in the Congressional Globe, predecessor of the Congressional Record. Quoted by Edwards and Thurman, 7.

[10] Edwards and Thurman, 12.

[11] Arthur Grinath III, John Joseph Wallis, and Richard Sylla, Debt, Default, and Revenue Structure: The American State Debt Crisis in the Early 1840s, NBER Historical Paper No. 97, March 1997, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/h0097/h0097.pdf.

[12] Sara S. Elkind, “Building a Better Jungle,” Journal of Urban History 24, no. 1 (November 1997): 53–7, at 54.

[13] Edwards and Thurman,  29.

Cornfield image is by Johan Neven and licensed by Creative Commons.