not have come at a better time. Although the United States did not formally enter World War II until late 1941, the country had been shipping rapidly rising volumes of meat and grain for food and feed to the UK from the start of the war in 1939. Those exports continued to grow to feed Allied troops and civilians around the world during the war and in the decades of recovery after.
War was linked to the rise of industrial agriculture in two other historical instances. Both meat and vegetables tended to be local or regional markets from time immemorial. The canning of meat had been pioneered to feed Napoleon’ s army, but the need for the US government to feed more than two million soldiers and sailors during the Civil War led to the industrialization of meat packing and shipping of food and feed by rail on a scale never before seen.
After the Civil War those meat-packing firms sought new markets in the cities booming with immigrants. That was the era of the cattle drives, as many former soldiers on both sides turned cowboy, rounding up vast herds of cattle gone wild during the conflict.
The other, and arguably the biggest, inflection point in the industrialization of agriculture was the commercial process to fix nitrogen developed in the early years of the 20th century. Before that, all crop production was limited by the nitrogen available in the soil, or added by manure or other natural sources. Crops had to be rotated, or fields left fallow in clover or other nitrogen-fixing plants.
The broad connection to war is that the same nitrogen compounds that are used to make fertilizer can also be used to make explosives. Munitions production for both World War I and World War II turned to fertilizer production after hostilities ceased. The specific connection to corn is that the epic productivity of hybrids can only be sustained by massive inputs of fertilizer and irrigation.
Mechanization also increased in the 1940s. That was first an expedient as many farm workers went off to war, and then a necessity to plant, fertilize and harvest larger crops on more acres.
“ Hybrids are bred for more of the carbon fixed as carbohydrates to go into the kernel and less into the leaves and stalk,” said Smith.“ But mostly they are bred to tolerate higher density. Higher yield
Margaret Smith, professor of plant breeding and genetics in the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University:“ Higher yield comes mostly from more plants per acre.”
comes mostly from more plants per acre. It was once standard to have 12,000 to 15,000 plants per acre. Now it’ s common to have 32,000 or more.”
What looks like a corn field is really a starch factory. Corn is uniquely productive, but to achieve that it is uniquely needy.
It is important to note that agricultural subsidies in the United States were originally based on trying to balance price stability to sustain farmers while also keeping food prices reasonable for consumers.
That included provisions for stockpiling corn in fecund years for sale in lean years, as well as paying farmers to keep land out of production to try to prevent oversupply.
That all changed in the early 1970s. Earl“ Rusty” Butz was Secretary of Agriculture in the Nixon administration. A massive sale of grain to Russia in 1972 was one big factor in rising food prices in the United States. The following year, the Arab oil embargo added to inflationary pressures. Exhorting farmers to plant“ fencerow to
www. MoAF. org | Fall 2025 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 25