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 19th 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]
Studying U. S. agricultural history, as I have been doing, sheds new light on historical issues that once seemed solved. Thus my question: Could the deterioration of Southern soil have been a cause of the Civil War?
We know that the Civil War was not fought over freeing slaves but over whether slavery would expand as the nation moved westward. [1] It is less well-known that the South experienced widespread deterioration of its land during the half-century before the Civil War. Much of the South was planted in large monocultures, first tobacco and then cotton. Growing cotton and tobacco year after year takes the nutrients out of the soil.
Some years ago, in preparation for a conference, I read Harvard College’s 1650 charter. I learned that the school’s goal was “the education of the English and Indian youth of this country in knowledge and godliness.”
So Harvard was chartered to serve Indian as well as English youth? That surprised me. My knowledge of Massachusetts Indians had stopped in elementary school, with Squanto aiding the Pilgrims.[1] So I wondered, what was the relationship between Massachusetts settlers and Native Americans?
I am learning the answer, as I audit a course on U.S. agricultural history.[2] Agriculture is an important part of the story of that relationship, which fell apart in a disastrous war in 1675. “No problem vexed relations between settlers and Indians more frequently in the years before the war than the control of livestock,” wrote Virginia DeJohn Anderson in a pioneering article on the causes of the conflict known as King Philip’s War.[3] Continue reading “A Clash of (Agri)cultures”
It is now accepted that Joseph Stalin perpetrated mass murder in the Ukraine Soviet Republic in 1932 and 1933. A famine occurred throughout the Soviet Union but the most severe impact was in the vital wheat-growing Ukraine because Stalin wanted to wipe out Ukrainian resistance to the Soviets.
“Farms, villages, and whole towns in Ukraine were placed on blacklists and prevented from receiving food,” writes Anne Applebaum in Britannica. “Peasants were forbidden to leave the Ukrainian republic in search of food.” Apparatchiks even entered homes and stole food. (The Soviets could requisition as much food as they wanted from those who produced it.) Millions died.
Many Western observers visited the Soviet Union around that time, but few revealed the true conditions. Most famously, Walter Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize for his generally positive stories from the Soviet Union in 1931; the worst horrors were going on a year later, but he did not report them.
Thomas Campbell (right) with the vice minister of agriculture of the Kazakhstan Soviet Republic. For credit see below.
Thomas D. Campbell was a farmer and mechanical engineer. In 1918, when he was 36 years old and World War I was spurring demand for wheat, he started a 95,000-acre wheat farm in southeastern Montana. It was the largest farm in the United States and possibly the world. Located primarily on land leased from the Crow Indian reservation, the farm obtained a $2 million investment from New York financier J. P. Morgan.
As time went on, Soviet agricultural experts visited Campbell’s farm to learn how to use so many machines efficiently, and Campbell went to the Soviet Union as a technical adviser, where he met Josef Stalin. Campbell was famous, influential, and popular. His farm continued well beyond his death in 1966.
