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]
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. Continue reading “The Secret Behind the U. S. Corn Belt”