A Garden Three Times the Area of France

The story of the first wave of industrialization began with the implementation of John Deere's polished steel plow in 1837. Finally plains farmers could easily cut through the tough packed soil quickly, but by doing so tore out as many 10 thousand species of native grasses that dated back 26 million years ago to the early Miocene , replacing them with a handful of cereal grains, the beginning of farming monoculture on the landscape. These cereal grains have been following humanity since the beginning of the Neolithic, providing calories for mankind and their animals.

Since about 3000 BCE, all of the significant cereals had been brought under cultivation, and not a single new major crop has been introduced since. Settlers could use the varieties of tall and short grasses to understand the quality of land and what types of cereals could be planted. Quickly the settling farmer transformed the productivity of this land from when hunter-gatherers needed fifteen square miles to sustain themselves--under their cultivation,the same land could provide sustenance for 5,000 people. Cereals are carbohydrate-rich and are comparable in their protein content with beans, nuts, and meats.

Cereal grains are ten times cheaper to produce than beef in terms of land and water consumption. Protein consumption is necessary to a human diet, and low protein consumption is second only to not having food in the first place as a leading cause of starvation. Cereal grains are an absolute necessity in the survival of mankind, while the consumption of meat is a symbol of affluence. Early Plains farmers relied on wheat and corn with yields exploding by the Deere steel plow, the mechanized tractor, and the chemicals that fueled its locomotion. New inventions for monoculture crops incentivizes their planting. The McCormick mechanical reaper replaced extensive hand harvesting with sickles. This mechanical monster cut all the uniform crop and laid it neatly on the ground to be bound up and threshed by a mechanical thresher. By the 1920s the combine harvester was developed that streamlined all of the separate processes into one machine. From 1829, 14 hours were required to harvest of wheat, the combine did the job in less than 30 minutes. Advances in technology has pushed agricultural production towards growing monoculture crops:

"The move from prairie diversity to today's monoculture fields stocked with wheat, milo, or corn breaks the first rule of ecology, which is that diversity brings health while simplicity results in death. Soil, plants, climate, and other natural forces, alone and together, generate the complexity of ecological creativity. In Wes Jackson's words, ‘To maintain the ever-normal granary, the agricultural human's pull historically has been toward the monoculture of annuals. Nature's pull is toward a polyculture of perennials.’"

The droughts and dust bowls that cycled in the recorded history of European settlement in the 19th and 20th centuries are only blips in long geologic history. Short term or long, the High Plains have not been a good place for man or animal for tens of thousands of years if prehistoric records of animal depopulation and the historical human de-populations are any indications. There were no permanent American Indian settlements in the Dust Bowl region. No doubt the immediate human future will see more of the same droughts and blowing soils.

Humanity's utter dependence upon the thin layer of rocky debris called soil is summed up in Albrecht's Dilemma, named after pioneering Missouri soil scientist William A. Albrecht. To feed themselves, humans intervene in nature by plowing up virgin soil, planting crops that produce more useful food than that would naturally grow on the land, but in the process, they speed up the depletion of nutrients from the soil with high levels of mineral solutions to feed their plants. The brief geologic moment of productive soil, "a temporary interlude for rocks and minerals on their way to solution and to the sea," is dangerously hastened by necessary human interference to produce sustenance to comfortably survive. (526)

The plains grassland had its own "rational stability or "health that is not the same as the "health of high-yield, profitable industrial farming. The objective of the Land Institute, for example, is to build diverse agriculture that can prosper on the plains as once the wild grassland did and serve human food needs as well. Wes Jackson has long argued that plains farming, like farming everywhere since the Agricultural Revolution twelve thousand years ago, destroys more than it builds and that nowhere is this more vivid than on the difficult plains" (879)

Coronado: "When Coronado began his surprisingly deep venture below the Rio Grande and tramped as far north and east as the wild Kansas country, he reported that the grassy sea called the High Plains had ‘no more landmarks than as if we had been swallowed up in the sea... because there was not a stone, nor a bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.’ The expedition had to navigate by sun and stars as if they were on the open ocean. Coronado had difficulty finding water. The adventurers found neither gold nor clues to a passage to Cathay; instead, they were forced to halt for endless roaming herds of massive buffalo as awesome as the land itself." 902

"Five soldiers on Zaldivar 1598 expedition deserted in panic when they entered the endless plains; they were more willing to risk capture by Indians than penetrate the lonely land." (910)

James Monroe told Thomas Jefferson that the entire United States west of the Appalachians was no bargain: " a great part of the territory is miserably poor and consists of extensive plains which have not had from appearances, and will not have, a single bush upon them for ages."910

Jefferson concluded it would take at least a100 generations before Americans would settle the continent to the western sea. The actual total would be less than 5 generations. The plains were too remote and inaccessible, devoid of major rivers that had opened up other American regions. One advantage to this empty, trackless geography was that no attacking army could sustain itself to invade the weak United States at its vulnerable backside. Even with significant logistical support, a large-scale military force would disappear into the vastness. However, Jefferson, always the optimist, rushed in 1803 to accept Napoleon's offer to sell the 830,000 square mile Louisiana Purchase wasteland at 15 million, or three cents an acre. 918

The landscape of the central plans might as well been a moonscape for the first European visitors. The visible scene was a minimalist landscape of unbounded grasses, the flat surrounding horizon, and the infinite sky. Any human presence shrank into nothingness. Lieutenant Zebulon Pike in 1810 shaped American opinion about the nation's new western territory when he reported that "a barren soil, parched and dried up for eight months in the year, presents neither moisture nor nutrition sufficient to nourish the timber. These vast plains of the western hemisphere may become in time equally celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa." 925

"In 1821 Major Stephen H Long reported his unhappy passage through the same great American desert. The land was unfit for cultivation and hence uninhabitable by pioneer farmers. Edwin James, a botanist with Major Long, spoke of a landscape of hopeless and irreclaimable sterility."

Washington Irving wrote in horror when he crossed the prairie in the 1830s that "there is something inexpressibly lonely in the solitude of the prairie... an immense extent of the landscape without a sign of human existence...the consciousness of being far, far beyond the bounds of human habitation; we feel as if moving in the midst of a desert world." (925)- Washington Irving, A Tour of the Prairies (Norman; University of Oklahoma Press, 1956)

Charles Dickens, already displeased with his American travels in 1840, took an instant dislike to the open country, "Looking toward the setting sun, there lay stretched before my view a vast expanse of what scarcely amounted to a scratch upon the great plank... a few birds wheeling here and there, with solitudes and silence reigning paramount around... oppressive in its barren monotony."

Today Interstate 80 between Chicago and Denver is interminable. Travelers still conclude that it is a mediocre and commonplace zone between the cosmopolitan east and the spectacular Rocky Mountains; in modern parlance, flyover country. (942)

The high plains grasslands are a land of uninhabitable extremes for the early settler, who understandably struggled in the waterless flatlands. The constant high winds stoked large open grass fires. The wind brought parched dry scorching windy summers, that with mechanized farming brought dust bowl conditions. on the opposite extreme, Fiercely cold winters in that could go as cold as -50 Fahrenheit in areas around the aquifer.

"The ominous landscape was an affront to America's Manifest Destiny. Nevertheless, a few observant settlers learned to look beyond the old desert myth, and they soon deduced that the land was unusually fertile, had no trees or rocks to clear before plowing, and was nowhere too steep for the wagon or the plow." (950)

In 1811 botanist John Bradbury concluded, "it can be cultivated... it will be one of the most beautiful countries in the world." "We must pronounce this the most charming country our eyes have ever beheld. Beautiful rolling prairie, undulating like the waves of the sea, high limestone cliffs with immense bottomlands, stretching into thousands of acres as rich as it is possible for it to be, high tablelands with a soil a number of feet in depth." 957

Anyone who saw the high plains as an insurmountable obstacle "must know little of the American people, who supposes they can be stopped by anything in the shape of deserts."957

"The skill and enterprise of American farmers will find the means of obtaining comfort and wealth in those regions, both of Kansas and Nebraska, which many are disposed to condemn as worthless." Athearn, High Country Empire, 60. 957

Indiana Senator G.S Orth announced that "our good Uncle Sam has come here, and he brings with his science and civilization. He intends to plant a part of his great family permanently; for he is now founding empires." 966

A journalist announced that the Great Plains offered "a garden three times the area of France." 966, Emmons, Influence of Ideology on Changing Environmental Images.

"To the aspiring young husband and wife of a farm family, rumors of a vast grassland but under rainless skies were not encouraging, despite the national passion that Everyman deserved his God-given share of the virtually free land carved out of the public domain."