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Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Features”
I’m Mark Oppold with an American Agriculture History Minute. Iowa is located where the great eastern forests and the prairies of the western United States met. There’s not a straight line where trees stopped and grass took over, but it is in Iowa where trees finally gave way to the endless miles of the Great Prairie. Settlers on the prairie …
I’m Mark Oppold with an American Agriculture History Minute. By 1813, the western frontier had reached the Mississippi River. St. Louis was the largest town on the frontier and it even then called the gateway for travel on westward. There was wide agreement on the need to settle new territories quickly, but the debate polarized over the price the government …
I’m Mark Oppold with an American Agriculture History Minute. Plantation agriculture began in the 1600s and 1700s. Developed in Virginia, first of all, and then spreading to Maryland where tobacco was grown. Then and eventually, South Carolina and beyond. Cotton became a major plantation crop after 1800 in a region that arced from North Carolina through Texas, where the climate …
I’m Mark Oppold with an American Agriculture History Minute. Radio is an important part in the history of American agriculture. Broadcasting information to rural America started very soon after the invention of AM radio. WHA, Madison, Wisconsin, began broadcasting weather reports to rural America in January 1921. Just two months later, an Illinois grain dealer put WDZ on the air …
I’m Mark Oppold with an American Agriculture History Minute. Early settlers, unfortunately, tended to be careless with the use and care of their soil. This was the case across the country, as Americans were used to thinking that there would always be more land for new farms. And by the 1880s, they saw this would not be the case much …
I’m Mark Oppold with an American Agriculture History Minute. The first settlers in Plymouth Colony planted mostly barley and peas with seeds they brought with them from England. But their most important crop as time went on was Indian corn or maize, which they were shown how to cultivate by the Native Americans. To fertilize that first crop, they used …
I’m Mark Oppold with an American Agriculture History Minute. Ethnicity made a big difference in early American agriculture. German Americans, for example, brought with them practices and traditions that were quite different from those English and Scottish farmers. Germans adapted old -world techniques here, where land was more abundant in supply. They generally preferred oxen to horses for plowing, for …
I’m Mark Oppold with an American Agriculture History Minute. Westward expansion in the U .S. did not come easy or did not come early on. The British Empire attempted to restrict westward expansion with their ineffective Proclamation Line of 1763, of course abolished after the American Revolutionary War. The first major movement west of the Appalachian Mountains came from farmers …
I’m Mark Oppold with an American Agriculture History Minute. Horses and oxen provided a lot of the power on American farms until the mid -1800s. Oxen were too slow to pull some of the new machinery. Producers were using in the 1850s and 1860s. Most of the horses were fast enough, but they tired quickly. Powerful animals like the draft …
I’m Mark Oppold with an American Agriculture History Minute. In the 1850s, there was a great push, migration to the west, finally crossing the Mississippi River and settling in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. Farmers arriving from many different regions of the U .S. brought their special agricultural ideas with them. Those producers who had settled in New England and …
