Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
an understanding of how temperature and precipitation patterns have historically
influenced crop productivity. Because trends cannot be understood in the absence
of historical context, we begin the chapter with a brief historical background of the
NCR, including the rise of corn and soybean as important crops, the industrializa-
tion of agriculture, and the advent of agricultural ecology as a scientific discipline.
A Short Agricultural History of the North Central Region
Land Transformation
The western movement of U.S. agriculture during the nineteenth century was
facilitated by three primary factors. First, some 30 million immigrants came to the
United States between 1815 and 1914, mainly from Germany, Italy, Ireland, and
Austria-Hungary. Second, the cleared forest lands in much of the eastern United
States had low productivity and were unable to produce sufficient yields for the
increasing human population. And third, vast tracts of potential agricultural land—
stretching from the Ohio Valley to the Rocky Mountains—were identified by expe-
ditions such as those of Lewis and Clark in the early 1800s (DeVoto 1953). These
areas were made accessible by mid-century transportation advances that included
water routes such as the Erie Canal, which opened the Great Lakes portion of the
NCR to westward expansion, and railroads that provided access to southern regions
of the NCR.
The increasing availability of arable land to newcomers provided a huge incen-
tive to establish row-crop agriculture in the NCR. Wheat (
Triticum aestivum
L.)
was a dominant early crop because it was readily adaptable to the region's soils
and climate. As the vast bison (
Bison bison
) herds in the western part of the NCR
were harvested and replaced by domestic cattle and hogs, corn was grown to fat-
ten grazed animals before transport to the emerging livestock markets in Chicago.
Corn-livestock agriculture was well established in the southern states of the NCR
by 1850 (Hudson 1994).
Corn-livestock agriculture spread slowly from southern states northward and
by 1880 reached well into Michigan's southern peninsula, southern Wisconsin,
and southern Minnesota (Hudson 1994). In the year 1890, the 41 packing houses
in Chicago slaughtered 13 million head of livestock, accounting for 50% of the
U.S. urban wholesale meat business (Hudson 1994). By the 1920s, the center
of the NCR corn-growing region had shifted northward with the availability of
high-yielding corn varieties adapted to more northern latitudes (Hudson 1994). And
northern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa had rich soils well suited for growing
corn closer to the Chicago livestock markets.
As agriculture expanded into the northern wooded portion of the NCR, trees
were cleared to open farmland and provide other parts of the Midwest with lumber
for buildings and furniture. Thousands of small sawmills were erected on water-
ways of Michigan and Wisconsin to process logs from vast inland stands of white
pine and hardwood. In eastern Michigan, for example, the Saginaw River alone
supported over 100 sawmills along a 56-km (35-mile) reach (Kilar 1990).
