Migration and Adaptation: Developing New Farming Strategies on the American Grasslands, 1875-1925

D. Aidan Mcquillan

Chapter 8 in Migrants in Agricultural Development, 1991, pp 111-131 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract During the final quarter of the nineteenth century the outlines of one of the great grain producing regions of the world gradually crystallised. As the agricultural frontier pushed westwards across the American grasslands in the 1860s and 1870s, farmers from the humid Mississippi lowlands and immigrants from overseas flooded into Kansas and Nebraska, laying the foundations for what would become the winter wheat belt of the ‘North American Breadbasket’. Wheat and corn had vied with one another as the most lucrative cash crop while the frontier moved across the broad Mississippi lowlands in the centre of the continent.1 But as the frontier moved from the humid lowlands to the sub-humid plains, wheat began to win out over corn as environmental factors imposed constraints on farm production. The plains represented a new environmental zone in which a new approach to farming was required.

Keywords: Winter Wheat; Immigrant Group; Agricultural Development; Farm Income; Drought Hazard (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1991
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-11830-4_8

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DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-11830-4_8

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