My own name for central Illinois is “the factory floor of U.S. industrial agriculture.” Before moving here in 2018, I’d only ever flown over or driven through this region and never gave much thought to what people had to do to the land before all this food would just spring forth. The story I probably heard well before graduating from high school was that settlers just broke the ground and dropped in seeds and presto, cornfields—or wheat fields, or whatever fields. The other story I definitely heard was about all this topsoil getting washed away because of cropping practices, and more recently the story of disappearing wetlands, some of which have been restored since creation in 1985 of the Conservation Reserve Program.
I never thought until moving here about what happened to those wetlands in the first place, or more precisely, how the settlers got rid of them. Then I read a book about the wetlands of the upper Midwest (as one does), wanting to get some insight into the historic stratigraphy of the area, and learned about subsurface “tile” drainage. Tiles are just big clay pipes—they aren’t flat—perforated to allow subsurface water to flow into them and sloped so they empty into drainage canals that themselves ultimately end up (around here) in the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.
When the European-origin settlers first arrived in the upper Midwest, they mostly farmed in areas that weren’t too wet or just continued until they got to well-drained soil. Extensive areas of wetland, including large areas in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, weren’t worth the cost of drainage, so they accumulated in large parcels owned by people who raised cattle there (which could presumably get themselves out of the mire predictably enough to be worth the investment) instead of crops.
By the mid-1800s, urban growth in booming Eastern cities created huge demand for food, especially meat, especially pork. The railroad boom after about 1850 responded to and reinforced the demand—and the demand of all those animals for grain, which far exceeded (as today) direct human consumption (especially of corn). By 1865, so many rail lines converged in Chicago that nine railroad companies formed a consortium to buy 320 acres of marshland and build the now-infamous Union Stockyard. (Yes, that’s the stockyard made infamous in 1906 by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Leda and I still cite the main character, Jurgis, who greeted every setback with the phrase, “I will work harder!”)
Those changes in livestock production made extensive spreads like those on central Illinois wetlands less economical for raising cattle, but they also made it economical to drain the wetlands to grow feed crops (and to build more railroads to carry all that grain to market). Drainage still demanded huge amounts of labor, which made drainage technology one of many attractive targets for capitalist investment in the mechanization of agriculture.
By now, 35% of the cropland and pasture in Illinois is tile-drained, as is half of that in Indiana and Ohio. In Champaign county, that figure reaches 80%.
Like any infrastructure, tiles are a system whose parts won’t work unless the whole does. The whole system, of course, includes a lot more than just one property owner. As a consequence, some of the earliest local government units in the U.S. formed so that the common beneficiaries from system-wide investment would also pay for those investments. Michigan’s first drainage districts formed around the time of statehood, in the late 1830s; Illinois didn’t pass a statute for this purpose until 1879. Today, Champaign County has 102 drainage districts, around 80 of which are active and have appointed or elected drainage district commissioners. Their job today centers not on building new drains but on maintaining the existing ones.
That’s why I call this the factory floor: It was built to grow corn on—and now, corn and soy, each of which account for about 45% of the 900 square miles of cropland in this 1000-square-mile county. Not that it can’t be scenic—but it’s a different kind of beauty than areas where I can imagine the landscape before European arrival.
(Since blogs are often one long tangent, here’s a short tangent for this long tangent: New Mexico has some of the nation’s oldest units of local government, acequia districts created by groups of irrigators based on rules first set out in the Law of the Indies in 1573 and encoded more recently in state statutes. One of my favorite books ever, about any topics, is Stanley Crawford’s Mayordomo, which recounts the author’s experience being the ditch boss in an acequia association in northern NM. Whether it’s to deliver water where we don’t have enough, or to get rid of it when there’s too much, management of water has motivated the creation of governance institutions since the beginning of agriculture.)
I am fascinated by your story of the tile-drainage infrastructure history of the midwest and struck by the environmental impact the drainage of those wetlands must have had on populations of waterfowl and wetland-dependent wildlife, another dimension to the metaphor, factory floor. Also, thanks for the reference to Crawford’s book. BTW, last I heard, UNM Taos Campus and Harwood Museum were trying to work out facility details for an acequia museum that I thought would be interesting.
Thannks Forrest– yes, the ecological transformation of this region has been huge, and the downstream impacts are still felt every year with the growth of the anoxic dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico created by fertilizer runoff. And, I would go to Taos if only to visit that museum, though there are plenty of other great reasons too.
You referred early on to the Prince book? That was very engaging. There seems to be also a self-sustaining connection: it was really hard to beak the sod, which was aided by mechnization, which was expensive, thus requiring only the highest – profit crop (corn), which benefits from further mechanization, which is expensive, which….
Yes, that book was a totally lucky find for me. I think I just happened on it — the title (Wetlands of the American Midwest: A Historical Geography of Changing Attitudes) obscures just how interesting it is. And right on about the self-sustaining connections. The feedback loops among investment capital, urban growth, technological development, land speculation, agriculture, etc. etc. etc. make it difficult to disentangle what actually caused what. Or maybe, these connections suggest that thick description of the whole system satisfies more than any A==>B causal narrative.
Excellent post, Rolf! An enjoyable ride through the economic and physical geography of central Illinois. It reminded me of William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis. Like most planners, I am fascinated by the mechanics of how we move water around and how the technologies that we come up with shape our political, economic, social, and natural landscapes. So I guess soy=clowns and corn=jokers, with you stuck in the middle 🙂
Yes, Nature’s Metropolis is a big influence for me, and especially in this post since it’s about Chicago in its region(s). But it’s been about 25 years since I read it, so I really need to go back to it to reconnect with the storytelling (one of the best-told non-fiction books ever, in my opinion) and the facts of the case.
Also, I’m def into the physical technology and mechanics, but as much into the social technologies that emerge to allow larger groups of people (especially those not related or working for the same company) to invest in the up-front costs and pay for the long-term maintenance cost. It seems so self-evident that we should, and that we need to, do this. But there’s such a strong narrative now that collective commitments like these are unacceptable constraints on “freedom,” rather than enablers of greater satisfaction and even arguably true liberty. This connects, too, to your book (Housing Justice), which I look forward to reading soon.
Impressed you are able to make the history of water management interesting and even fun! “Soy to the left of me, corn to the right . . .” here I am, stuck in the middle with you 🙂
Oh, and wow to this stat: “In Champaign county, that figure reaches 80%.”!!
I’ve been listening to Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing. She’s a SF Bay Area native, and waxes rhapsodic about that region and embraces bioregionalism as an alternative to monetized, screen-captured attention. It has a lot of good points, but I have a hard time seeing how it applies to this bioregion, which has been so thoroughly modified that only relict stands of trees and some prairie restoration projects remain. Scraps and simulacra? But I also want to maintain hope, and imagine a reinvented bioregion that would restore natural processes. Seems like that might require a wholesale rejection of Big Meat.
Another side note: About 40% of corn grown in the US goes to fuel ethanol production (https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feedgrains/feedgrains-sector-at-a-glance/). It costs about $1.75 to make each gallon of corn ethanol, which is about what it brings on the market. But federal subsidies are so generous that corn production has stayed high for years (https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/understanding-u-s-corn-ethanol-and-other-corn-based-biofuels-subsidies/). Of the rest, most goes to animal feed, and 10-20% of the total is exported.
What an interesting post that is also extremely relevant to Iowa.
Thanks Amy Erica! Yes, parts of Iowa are extensively tiled, as the maps show.