The Commercialization of Agriculture in the United States

Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father of the United States, believed that farmers were the foundation of American democracy. To execute his plan for democracy, Jefferson proposed the United States Rectangular Land Survey- -familiarly known as the grid. Under the plan, surveyors were first sent to eastern Ohio with instructions to divide the land into boxes that would measure six miles square. Then they were instructed to divide these larger boxes into smaller ones, one-mile square, which were divided yet again into quarter sections measuring 160 acres each, considered to be the appropriate size for a single farm. In 1785 Congress passed the grid into law, and from that point on the same checkerboard pattern was etched across the West- -one of the most far-reaching attempts at rationalizing a landscape in world history.

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The grid was the outward expression of a culture wedded not simply to democracy but to markets and exchange as well. It would aid in the rapid settlement of the country, turning millions of Americans into independent landowners, while at the same time transforming the land itself- its varied topography, soil, and water conditions- into a commodity, a uniform set of boxes easily bought and sold. But the grid was only the first step in the commercialization of Western farmlands.

Once farmers purchased land they needed to plow up the existing vegetation. The grasses that thrived on the organically rich, deep soil laid down by the glaciers thousands of years earlier were at first a challenge to cut. Wooden plows with edges made of iron proved virtually useless. The development and spread of the steel plow-invented in 1837 by John Deere, an llinois blacksmith- -made plowing successful. In place of the native vegetation, farmers planted corn and wheat, domesticated species of grass that grow best in a monocultural environment, that is, in fields by themselves. These crops tend to grow quickly, storing carbohydrates in their seeds. With bread constituting a major component of the American diet, wheat would eventually emerge as the West's major cash crop; acres and acres of some of the world's best agricultural land in states such as Ohio, Indiana, llinois, lowa, and Kansas were plowed up and given over to the plant.

In the early years of setlement, farmers grew a variety of grains, including wheat, corn, oats, rye, and barley. Increasingly, however, farmers became more specialized, as commercial agriculture, aided by improved railroad transportation, proceeded apace. Much of the grain ended up in the Northeast, where, by the 1840s, population growth had outstripped the local farm economy's ability to provide. In effect, the West's surplus of soil wealth underwrote industrial development farther east.

The railroads not only delivered the products of the rich soils of the Western grasslands into the stomachs of Easterners, they also changed the meaning of the crops themselves. With waterborne transportation, farmers put their grain into sacks so they could easily be loaded into the irregularly shaped holds of steamboats. The advent of the railroads and steam-powered grain elevators (first developed in 1842) spurred farmers to eliminate the sack altogether. Now grain would move like a stream of water, making its journey to market with the aid of a mechanical device that loaded all the wheat from a particular area into one large grain car. Sacks had preserved the identity of each load of grain. With the new technology, however, grain from different farms was mixed together and sorted by grade. The Chicago Board of Trade (established in 1 848) divided wheat into three categories- spring, white winter, and red winter- -applying quality standards to each type. Wheat was turned into an abstract commodity, with ownership over the grain diverging from the physical product itself. By the 1860s, a futures market in grain had even emerged in Chicago. It was now possible to enter into a contract to purchase or sell grain at a particular price. What was being marketed here was not the physical grain itself so much as an abstraction, the right to trade something that may not even have been grown yet.