Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 2 (2003), p. 244

McLean County extends for about fifty miles from east to west, and half that from north to south, around Bloomington in Illinois, roughly halfway between Chicago and St. Louis. It has over 700,000 acres of glacial clay soil with a high lime and organic matter content, perfect for corn growing once drained, and its proud boast is that for much of its history (since the arrival of people of European origin) it has been the leading corn (i.e. maize) producing county in the United States. This book records that history, well illustrated with maps, prints and photographs.

The native American population fled this area between about 1812 and 1830, and the early settlers, many of them native-born Americans from Kentucky, Ohio and the eastern states, moved in. Most of the land remained in prairie grass, over which roamed herds of cattle and pigs. Keeping these scavengers out of the crops was a major problem, which was why prairie next to woodland that could be cut for fence posts and rails was most valuable. By the 1840s woodland was in short supply, and miles of Osage orange hedgerow were planted to keep arable fields stockproof. The corn in these fields was variable and low yielding, and mostly fed to livestock, since transport was primitive and markets distant. The typical farm of 1850 covered 160 acres, half of which were improved, growing wheat, oats and hay, as well as corn, of which the county as a whole produced some three million bushels. At the end of the twentieth century the average farm size had trebled, most of the livestock had disappeared, along with the fences and hedges, and corn output had increased twentyfold, to about sixty million bushels.

The book tells the story of this transformation. It is essentially about a series of technical changes and their economic and social effects. The first was the arrival of the railroad in 1853, bringing timber and agricultural machinery in, and taking corn and livestock out. By 1895 few farmers were more than four miles from a railroad and the grain elevator was a common landscape feature. Between the 1870s and the 1890s there was a tile drainage boom that dramatically increased the arable potential of the county, and by the end of the nineteenth century corn-planting machines were available. In the early years of the twentieth century the Funk Brothers Seed Company began to produce improved seed by selecting from existing strains of corn, and the general air of quiet prosperity was reflected in a rash of farmhouse and barn building. The inter-war years were much tougher, but they still saw the arrival of the tractor and the mechanical corn picker, and the spread of hybrid corn in the late 1930s, with its dramatic impact on yields. The disappearance of the horse also led to the replacement of oats by soybeans, and after 1950 fertilizers and herbicides came in and livestock and hedges gradually went out.

The ability of succeeding generations of McLean County farmers, and their counterparts in other midwestern states, to break the prairie, grow ever-increasing quantities of corn, and ship it to markets around the world, was affecting East Anglian grain prices and West Country feed prices by the 1880s. Their pride in producing corn and their ability and desire to keep on doing so is affecting markets in developing countries and the progress of world trade negotiations today. At first sight this is a local story, told from a local perspective. Nevertheless, its impact has been global.