History
In the era from 1860 to 1982, new agricultural technology transformed the Corn Belt from a mixed crop-and-livestock farming area to a highly specialized cash-grain farming area. While the landscape was greatly modified, the family farm remained the normal form. Its acreage doubled, as farmers bought out their neighbors (who then moved to nearby towns). After 1970 increased crop and meat production required an export outlet, but global recession and a strong dollar reduced exports, depressed prices below costs of production, and created serious problems even for the best farm managers.
Vice President Henry A. Wallace, a politician and pioneer of hybrid seeds, declared in 1956 that the Corn Belt developed the "most productive agricultural civilization the world has ever seen".
Read more about this topic: Corn Belt
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)