American Agriculture History Minute: Weather Determined the Crops

I’m Mark Oppold with an American Agriculture History Minute.

Early settlers would learn that weather would often dictate the crops they would raise.

In cooler regions, wheat was often the crop of choice when lands were newly settled, leading to a wheat frontier that continued to move west and, over now, what is the plains? Also a very common corn.

Warmer regions saw plantings of cotton and herds of beef cattle. In early colonial South, raising tobacco and cotton very common. In fact, by the late 1850s, the South produced 100 % of the 374 million pounds of cotton used each year.

That’s today’s American Agriculture History Minute. I’m Mark Oppold. Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.