Special Update | 250 Years of American Agriculture

AgriNext is only a few weeks away — July 27–28 at Ballpark Village, St. Louis, presented by No Bull Ag and Bloomberg.

Full agenda and registration at NoBullAg.com/AgriNext.

Editor’s Note

This one is not short, but I can honestly say it has been one of the more interesting and enjoyable projects our team has worked on.

We undoubtedly missed some things — probably a lot of things — because there is no way to fit 250+ years of American agricultural history into one update. But we tried to hit the moments that mattered most in shaping the system we know today.

Grab your beverage of choice, settle in, and let’s celebrate the role agriculture has played in building, feeding, and shaping the United States over the past 250 years.

-Susan

As America approaches 250 years, we tend to tell the country’s story through familiar images: thirteen colonies along the Atlantic, a Declaration, a war for independence, and a flag that eventually stretched from coast to coast.

But agriculture has been part of the story from the beginning.

Before America became an industrial power, it was a farm country. Its early economy was built around land, labor, crops, livestock, rivers, weather, and the constant push to produce more from each acre.

That is the 250-year history of American agriculture.

It’s not a perfect story. But it is the American story.

Native crops and Native displacement. Cotton and slavery. Steel plows and railroads. Dust and conservation. Farm booms and farm busts. Tractors, synthetic fertilizer, biofuels, trade wars, policy fights, and fewer farmers feeding more people than any generation before them.

Through all of it, the job at hand has not changed: demand more from the same acre.

And we have.

The crops changed. The tools changed. The labor changed. The markets changed. The policy changed.

But the pressure to do more with the same acre never went away.