U.S.A. at 250: Agriculture Has Been a Cornerstone

I’m showing my age, but I was a teenager when America celebrated its Bicentennial in 1976. This year we are celebrating the United States’ 250th anniversary, its Semiquincentennial. Throughout those years, agriculture has been a cornerstone of America’s development. Countless farmers, families, inventors, plant breeders, engineers, organizations, companies, and Acts of Congress have contributed to the feeding of our nation’s people and agricultural advancement.

Established in 1785, the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture is the oldest organization of its kind in the United States. Starting shortly after America declared its independence, it was founded to promote animal husbandry and other aspects of agriculture.

Several pioneers and inventors made their mark on American agriculture. Cyrus Hall McCormick tried out his prototype reaper, successfully cutting 6 acres of oats in 1831. He obtained a patent for “The McCormick Reaper” on June 21, 1834. It was a pivotal innovation in American agriculture, enabling large‑scale farming and transforming the U.S. grain industry.

Early wood and cast-iron plows (Old English: ploughs) tended to stick in heavy prairie soils. John Deere invented the steel moldboard plow in 1837, which could till heavy prairie soils without clogging.

USDA’s After a Hundred Years, The Yearbook of Agriculture 1962, speaks of farms in 1862. “On farms, food was mostly grown and preserved at home. Much of the clothing was homespun. Homemade candles and the flicker of the fireplace provided light. Animals and men were the power that tilled the soil. Buildings were erected from home-sawn trees or from the sod of the prairie. Fuel came from the woodlot or was the cow chips that littered the range.”

President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill that established the U.S. Department of Agriculture May 15, 1862. He signed the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862, opening half a continent to the plow. Lincoln also signed the Land-Grant College Act on July 2, 1862.

In what would be his final annual message to Congress, Lincoln called USDA “The People's Department.” At that time, about half of all Americans lived on farms, compared with about 2 percent today.

The Land-Grant College Act would establish at least one college in each state to teach “agriculture and the mechanic arts.” These colleges would more directly meet the practical needs of all citizens than other institutions of that era, which emphasized classical studies. Land-grant colleges would emphasize research and instruction to increase agricultural production, improve the conditions of rural life, and support the young nation’s growing industry.

Purdue University became Indiana’s land-grant college in 1869, and it remains Indiana’s only land-grant university. Classes began at Purdue with six instructors and 39 students in 1874. In 2026, there are approximately 58,000 undergraduate and graduate students at Purdue.

In 1874, the availability of barbed wire allowed fencing of rangeland, ending an era of unrestricted, open-range grazing.

Steam engines were used to power equipment like circular saws and threshing machines on farms from the mid-1800’s through the early 1900s, when the first self-propelled traction engines came on the scene. According to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the word “tractor” was first coined by the Hart Parr company in 1903. Learn about these early machines and more in Pioneer Village at the Indiana State Fair each year.

USDA states that federal forest management dates back to 1876, when Congress created the office of Special Agent in the U.S. Department of Agriculture to assess the quality and conditions of forests in the United States. In 1881, the USDA launched a Division of Forestry, becoming the U.S. Forest Service in 1905. Gifford Pinchot led this new agency as its first Chief, charged with caring for national forests. He made the conservation of natural resources a national issue.

The purpose of The Hatch Act of 1887 was to conduct agricultural research programs at State Agricultural Experiment Stations in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. insular areas. In short, it provided the framework for funding research at land-grant institutions.

President Woodrow Wilson signed the Smith-Lever Act into law on May 8, 1914, which provided for cooperative agricultural extension work at Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, with USDA as the Federal partner. Learn more in my article “Origins of the Cooperative Extension System and Purdue Extension” at https://extension.purdue.edu/news/county/whitley/2023/03/origins-of-the-cooperative-extension-system-and-purdue-extension.html. Here in Whitley County, Indiana, B.L. Hummel became our first county agent in 1917.

Hybrid seed corn became available to farmers in 1930. R.L. (Bob) Nielsen, Professor Emeritus at Purdue University, wrote, “American farmers grew open-pollinated corn varieties until the rapid adoption of hybrid corn began in the late 1930's. From 1866, the first year USDA began to publish corn yield estimates, through about 1936, yields of open-pollinated corn varieties in the U.S. were fairly stagnant and only averaged about 26 bu/ac throughout that 70-year period.” The average U.S. corn yield for 2025 was estimated at 186.5 bushels per acre, according to USDA-NASS’s Crop Production 2025 Summary released January 12, 2026. It is common for many of our local farmers to achieve yields in excess of 200 bushels per acre.

Of course, this is just scratching the surface of the rich history of agriculture and natural resources and of their cornerstone role in America’s development.