An unremembered diversity: mixed husbandry and the American grasslands.
The Green Revolution of the 1960s brought about a dramatic rise in global crop yields. But, as most observers acknowledge, this has come at a considerable cost to biodiversity. Plant breeding, synthetic fertilizers, and mechanization steadily narrowed the number of crop varieties commercially available to farmers and promoted fencerow-to-fencerow monocultures. Many historians trace the origins of this style of industrialized agriculture to the last great plow-up of the Great Plains in the 1920s. In the literature, farms in the plains are often described metaphorically as wheat factories, degrading successive landscapes. While in many ways these farms were a departure from earlier forms of husbandry in the American experience, monocultures were quite rare during the early transformation of the plains. Analysis of a large representative sample, based on manuscript agricultural censuses and involving twenty-five townships across the state of Kansas, demonstrates that diverse production reached even the most challenging of plains landscapes.
Univ. of Michigan; Univ. of Saskatchewan
Kenneth
K
Sylvester
Geoff
G
Cunfer
D000822:Animal Husbandry / Q000191:economics / Q000193:education / Q000266:history; D044822:Biodiversity; D019352:Censuses / Q000266:history; D018556:Crops, Agricultural / Q000191:economics / Q000266:history; D004190:Disasters / Q000191:economics / Q000266:history; D055864:Droughts / Q000191:economics / Q000266:history; D004777:Environment; D005843:Geography / Q000191:economics / Q000193:education / Q000266:history; D049673:History, 20th Century; D007615:Kansas / Q000208:ethnology; D015146:Midwestern United States / Q000208:ethnology; D012423:Rural Health / Q000266:history; D012424:Rural Population / Q000266:history; D012922:Social Change / Q000266:history; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors