The history of agriculture in the United States covers the period from the first English settlers to the present day. In Colonial America, agriculture was the primary livelihood for 90% of the population, and most towns were shipping points for the export of agricultural products. Most farms were geared toward subsistence production for family use. The rapid growth of population and the expansion of the frontier opened up large numbers of new farms, and clearing the land was a major preoccupation of farmers. After 1800, cotton became the chief crop in southern plantations, and the chief American export. After 1840, industrialization and urbanization opened up lucrative domestic markets. The number of farms grew from 1.4 million in 1850, to 4.0 million in 1880, and 6.4 million in 1910; then started to fall, dropping to 5.6 million in 1950 and 2.2 million in 2008.US Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2010 (2010) Table 800
Pre-Colonial era
Before the arrival of Europeans in North America, the continent supported a diverse range of indigenous cultures. While some populations were primarily hunter-gatherers, other populations relied on agriculture. Native Americans farmed domesticated crops in the Eastern Woodlands, the Great Plains, and the American Southwest.
Colonial farming: 1610–1775 Beginning in 1620, the first settlers in Plymouth Colony planted barley and peas from England but their most important crop was Indian corn (maize) which they were shown how to cultivate by the native Squanto. To fertilize this crop, they used small fish which they called herrings or shads.
Beginning in 1619, Southern plantation agriculture, using slaves, developed in Virginia and Maryland (where tobacco was grown), and South Carolina (where indigo and rice was grown). Cotton became a major plantation crop after 1800 in the "Black Belt," and throughout the region from North Carolina in an arc through Texas where the climate allowed for cotton cultivation.Jack P. Greene, Rosemary Brana-Shute, and Randy J. Sparks, eds. Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina's Plantation Society (Univ of South Carolina Press, 2021).
Apart from the tobacco and rice plantations, the great majority of farms were subsistence, producing food for the family and some for trade and taxes. Throughout the colonial period, subsistence farming was pervasive. Farmers supplemented their income with sales of surplus crops or animals in the local market, or by exports to the slave colonies in the British West Indies. Logging, hunting and fishing supplemented the family economy.
Ethnic farming styles Ethnicity made a difference in agricultural practice. German Americans brought with them practices and traditions that were quite different from those of the English and Scots. They adapted Old World techniques to a much more abundant land supply. For example, they generally preferred oxen to horses for plowing. Furthermore, the Germans showed a long-term tendency to keep the farm in the family and to avoid having their children move to towns.Richard H. Shryock, "British versus German traditions in colonial agriculture," Mississippi Valley Historical Review (1939) 26#1 pp. 39–54. in JSTORJames T. Lemon, "The agricultural practices of national groups in eighteenth-century southeastern Pennsylvania." Geographical Review (1966): 467–496. in JSTOR The Scots Irish built their livelihoods on some farming but more herding (of hogs and cattle). In the American colonies, the Scots-Irish focused on mixed farming. Using this technique, they grew corn for human consumption and for livestock feed, especially for hogs. Many improvement-minded farmers of different backgrounds began using new agricultural practices to increase their output. During the 1750s, these agricultural innovators replaced the hand sickles and scythes used to harvest hay, wheat, and barley with the cradle scythe, a tool with wooden fingers that arranged the stalks of grain for easy collection. This tool was able to triple the amount of work done by a farmer in one day. A few scientifically informed farmers (mostly wealthy planters like George Washington) began fertilizing their fields with dung and lime and rotating their crops to keep the soil fertile.
Before 1720, most colonists in the mid-Atlantic region worked in small-scale farming and paid for imported manufactures by supplying the West Indies with corn and flour. In New York, a fur-pelt export trade to Europe flourished and added additional wealth to the region. After 1720, mid-Atlantic farming was stimulated by the international demand for wheat. A massive population explosion in Europe drove wheat prices up. By 1770, a bushel of wheat cost twice as much as it did in 1720. Farmers also expanded their production of flaxseed and corn since flax was in high demand in the Irish linen industry and a demand for corn existed in the West Indies.
Many poor German immigrants and Scots-Irish settlers began their careers as agricultural wage laborers. Merchants and artisans hired teen-aged indentured servants, paying the transportation over from Europe, as workers for a domestic system for the manufacture of cloth and other goods. Merchants often bought wool and flax from farmers and employed newly arrived immigrants who had been textile workers in Ireland and Germany to work in their homes spinning the materials into yarn and cloth. Large farmers and merchants became wealthy, while farmers with smaller farms and artisans only made enough for subsistence.
New nation: 1776–1860 The U.S. economy was primarily agricultural in the early 19th century.Curtis P. Nettels, The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775–1815 (1962)Paul W. Gates, The Farmers' Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860 (1960) Westward expansion, including the Louisiana Purchase and American victory in the War of 1812 plus the building of canals and the introduction of steamboats opened up new areas for agriculture. Most farming was designed to produce food for the family, and service small local markets. In times of rapid economic growth, a farmer could still improve the land for far more than he paid for it, and then move further west to repeat the process. While the land was cheap and fertile, the process of clearing it and building farmsteads wasn't. Frontier life wasn't new for Americans but presented new challenges for farm families who faced the challenges of bringing their produce to market across vast distances. Although the production expanded very rapidly, during the Antebellum decades per capita food production did not keep pace with the rapidly expanding urban population and industrial labor.
South
In the Southern United States, the poor lands were held by poor white farmers, who generally owned no slaves.Sam Bowers Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840–1860 (2014). The best lands were held by rich plantation owners and were operated primarily with slave labor. These farms grew their own food and also concentrated on a few "cash crops" that could be exported to meet the growing demand in Europe, especially cotton, tobacco, and sugar. The cotton gin made it possible to increase cotton production. Cotton became the main export crop, but after a few years, the fertility of the soil was depleted and the plantation was moved to the new land further west. Much land was cleared and put into growing cotton in the Mississippi valley and in Alabama, and new grain growing areas were brought into production in the Mid West. Eventually this put severe downward pressure on prices, particularly of cotton, first from 1820 to 1823 and again from 1840 to 1843.John Solomon Otto, The Southern Frontiers, 1607–1860: The Agricultural Evolution of the Colonial and Antebellum South (1989). Sugar cane was being grown in Louisiana, where it was refined into granular sugar. Growing and refining sugar required a large amount of capital. Some of the nation's wealthiest men owned sugar plantations, which often had their own sugar mills.Joseph Carlyle Sitterson, Sugar country: the cane sugar industry in the South, 1753–1950 (1953).
New England In New England, subsistence agriculture gave way after 1810 to production to provide food and dairy supplies for the rapidly growing industrial towns and cities. New specialty export crops were introduced such as tobacco and cranberries.Percy W. Bidwell, "The Agricultural Revolution in New England," American Historical Review (1921) 26#4 pp. 683–702 in JSTOR Howard S. Russell, Long, Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England ((UP of New England, 1976).
Western frontier
The British government attempted to restrict westward expansion with the ineffective Proclamation Line of 1763, abolished by the new United States government. The first major movement west of the Appalachian Mountains began in Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina as soon as the war was won in 1781. Pioneers housed themselves in a rough lean-to or at most a one-room log cabin. The main food supply at first came from hunting deer, turkeys, and other abundant small game.
Clad in typical frontier garb, leather breeches, moccasins, fur cap, and hunting shirt, and girded by a belt from which hung a hunting knife and a shot pouch – all homemade – the pioneer presented a unique appearance. In a short time he opened in the woods a patch, or clearing, on which he grew corn, wheat, flax, tobacco and other products, even fruit. In a few years the pioneer added hogs, sheep and cattle, and perhaps acquired a horse. Homespun clothing replaced the animal skins. The more restless pioneers grew dissatisfied with over civilized life, and uprooted themselves again to move 50 or hundred miles (80 or 160 km) further west.Charles H. Ambler and Festus P. Summers, West Virginia, the mountain state (1958) p. 55.
In 1788, American pioneers to the Northwest Territory established Marietta, Ohio as the first permanent American settlement in the Northwest Territory. By 1813 the western frontier had reached the Mississippi River. St. Louis, Missouri was the largest town on the frontier, the gateway for travel westward, and a principal trading center for Mississippi River traffic and inland commerce. There was wide agreement on the need to settle the new territories quickly, but the debate polarized over the price the government should charge. The conservatives and Whigs, typified by president John Quincy Adams, wanted a moderated pace that charged the newcomers enough to pay the costs of the federal government. The Democrats, however, tolerated a wild scramble for land at very low prices. The final resolution came in the Homestead Law of 1862, with a moderated pace that gave settlers 160 acres free after they worked on it for five years.John R. Van Atta, Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785–1850 (Johns Hopkins University Press; 2014)
From the 1770s to the 1830s, pioneers moved into the new lands that stretched from Kentucky to Alabama to Texas. Most were farmers who moved in family groups.Ray Allen Billington and Martin Ridge, Westward Expansion (5th ed. 1982) pp. 203–328, 747–66 Historian Louis M. Hacker shows how wasteful the first generation of pioneers was; they were too ignorant to cultivate the land properly and when the natural fertility of virgin land was used up, they sold out and moved west to try again. Hacker describes that in Kentucky about 1812:
Hacker adds that the second wave of settlers reclaimed the land, repaired the damage, and practiced a more sustainable agriculture.Hacker, "Western Land Hunger and the War of 1812."
Railroad age: 1850s–1914