to high-fiber and carbohydrate-rich feeds. Similarly, putting hogs into confinement barns allowed the farmer to provide a carefully calibrated diet suited to the stage in the animals’ life cycle. Concrete or metal slatted floors meant no more trampling feed into the dirt. Furthermore, with closer confinement, it was relatively easier to monitor health conditions, especially for animals at vulnerable stages of the life cycle, such as gestational sows, piglets, and shoats. It was also easier to control the environment through heating or cooling, maximizing the potential uptake of nutrients and calories. Hot animals are often listless and do not eat, while cold animals use much of their caloric intake to stay warm (Finlay 2004; Anderson 2009).
Dairy farmers in the region were also quick to adopt new barns, milking parlors, and bulk handling systems. Stricter postwar health standards for the Grade A fluid milk that ended up delivered to stoops and in grocers’ cases were powerful push factors for adopting new techniques. With less labor at home, farmers who kept just a few cows for cream production got out of the business altogether. The farmers who stayed in production-built barns with “loose-housing” rather than prescribed stalls for each animal. They no longer milked at the stall while seated on the old milking stool; rather they milked in specially designed parlors with a recessed floor so that sanitary preparation of the udder and teats as well as electric-powered milkers could be performed with less stooping. Instead of dumping the fresh milk into cans by hand, glass tubes and vacuum power carried the milk into a large refrigerated tank for pick up in bulk trucks. Dairy production increased dramatically with the adoption of artificial insemination, which allowed farmers to draw on the most favorable genetics for their herds (Anderson 2009; Smith-Howard 2013).
Thanks to many of these new seeds, chemicals, tools, and techniques, farmers could cultivate more acres and take care of more animals with family labor. Land values increased in the postwar period as farmers hurried to spread these new fixed costs over more acres in the hopes of boosting farm income, a problem that was compounded by stagnant commodity prices. It was, as economist Willard Cochrane explained, a production treadmill; once on the treadmill, it required continued and ever more exertion to stay on, also making it difficult to get off (Anderson 2009).
By the early twenty-first century, both the farm landscape and rural society were simultaneously simpler and more complicated than they had been over the previous 200 years. They were simpler because there was less diversity in crop production, fewer farms with both crops and livestock, and fewer people and distinct communities. Yet they were also more complicated because those remaining farmers were more reliant on costly technological and scientific inputs that made farming more complex than ever, not to mention access to credit and the vagaries of markets. Family-sized units have been eclipsed, with a growing share of production controlled by a small number of entities that either contract with family farms or compete with them. Large-scale producers consolidated production and pushed many family farms out, even as much of the land was still owned by families. The ethnic and cultural backgrounds that once gave farming in the Midwest some variety have also receded. While elements of those cultures remain, most often enshrined in community festivals celebrating ethnic heritage, distinctive rural communities have faded. The physical and cultural landscapes that remain have been flattened.
Bibliographical Essay
Scholars have framed the development of the Midwest as a meeting of cultures since the publication of Richard Lyle Power’s Planting Corn Belt Culture (1953). It is a theme that has been developed by numerous historians, including Nicole Etcheson in The Emerging Midwest (1996). While Etcheson focused on politics, she established the imprint of the Upper South in shaping the region. Kenneth Winkle’s study, The Politics of Community (1988), emphasized the high degree of population turnover in the region during the antebellum period.
For overviews of the agriculture in the Midwest from settlement to the contemporary period, consult John C. Hudson’s Making the Corn Belt (1994) and Dennis Nordin and Roy Scott’s From Prairie Farmer to Entrepreneur (2005). Hudson, a cultural geographer, emphasized the cultural background of settlers and, like Etcheson and Power, argued for the importance of the Upper South in shaping agriculture. Nordin and Scott depicted the development of the region as one of innovation and adaptation, emphasizing the positive aspects of farm modernization. While they acknowledged the human cost of technological advancement and associated depopulation of the countryside and collapse of communities, they celebrated the entrepreneurial spirit of the region’s farmers and enthusiastically accepted the virtues of modern, high-tech, and high-capital agriculture.
Most historians of agriculture in the Midwest have written state-focused studies, with many of these devoted to explaining developments of the nineteenth century. The iconic example is Allan G. Bogue’s From Prairie to Corn Belt (1963). Bogue focused on Illinois and Iowa, addressing mechanization, livestock breeding, farm finances, and crop cultures. Robert Leslie Jones performed similar work for Ohio in A History of Agriculture in Ohio (1983). James Whitaker authored a pioneering study of beef cattle feeding in the nineteenth century, Feedlot Empire (1975). Like Bogue, Whitaker focused on developments in Iowa and Illinois. Doug Hurt’s The Ohio Frontier (1998) deals with settlement agriculture in the Ohio Country, while Paul Henlein’s Cattle Kingdom in the Ohio Valley (1959) focuses specifically on the feeding systems, cattle trails, and early breeders in the region. Hiram Drache’s Day of the Bonanza (1964) traces the wheat boom in the Red River Valley of the North in the late nineteenth century. Doug Hurt’s Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie (1992) demonstrated the power of slave-based commodity production and culture in the region. More recently, agricultural developments in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula and Indiana were addressed in Kenneth E. Lewis, West to Far Michigan (2002) and Paul Salstrom, From Pioneering to Persevering (2007), respectively, both of which cover the nineteenth century. The social tensions that accompanied changes in harvesting technology were explored in Peter and Jo Ann Argersinger’s “The Machine Breakers: Farm Workers and Social Change in the Rural Midwest of the 1870s” (1984).
Three state-level studies covered the history of farming into the twentieth century. Both Earl D. Ross’s Iowa Agriculture (1951) and Merrill Jarchow’s The Earth Brought Forth (1949) described developments up to the publication dates. They are excellent traditional accounts of Iowa and Minnesota farming, although both were narrowly conceived and need updating not only in temporal coverage but also in terms of approach. In The Rise of the Dairy Industry in Wisconsin (1963), Eric Lampard demonstrated the importance of Yankees in shaping one of the region’s most iconic commodities up to 1920.
More recent studies have taken a broader view of production, engaging environmental history and the history of technology. J.L. Anderson’s Industrializing the Corn Belt (2009) deals with decision-making at the farm level regarding mechanization and chemical techniques, as well as the environmental influences and consequences of those decisions. Kendra Smith-Howard’s Pure and Modern Milk (2013), an environmental history of the dairy industry, is not limited to the Midwest but the author utilized significant material from the region. For a broad, regional, overview of the post-World War II period that reflects contemporary concerns in the discipline, see Smith-Howard’s essay “Economy, Ecology, and Labor” in The Rural Midwest since World War II (2014). The author emphasized the importance of the major commodity crops of corn and soybeans, while also recognizing the region’s agricultural diversity. Joshua Brinkman and Richard Hirsch explained the ways in which midwestern farmers positioned themselves as technologically savvy practitioners in “Welcoming Wind Turbines and the PIMBY (“Please in My Backyard) Phenomenon: The Culture of the Machine in the Rural American Midwest” (2017). Mark Finlay’s model study “Hogs, Antibiotics, and the Industrial Environments of Postwar Agriculture” explains the application of life-cycle housing and feeding in the hog industry.
There are numerous works that deal with various aspects of crop and livestock production and processing that shaped the region. William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (1991), while ostensibly about Chicago, is concerned with the relationship between
