In 1790, nine out of ten Americans worked the land. Today, fewer than two in a hundred do. This is the story of how that happened, told through seven families.
A quick note before we start. The families you are about to meet are made up. I built each one out of the real history of its time and place, the way a living-history museum builds a farm you can walk through. The names are invented. Everything around them, the work, the food, the numbers, the hard parts, is real and sourced. Think of this as an impressionist painting, not a photograph. I wanted you to feel these lives, not just read statistics about them.
At Lake Geneva Country Meats, we are at the end of a very long food chain. Somebody planted crops and harvested them. Someone then fed those crops to an animal and raised that animal to maturity. The animal then came to LGCM and we are able to offer you meat to enjoy at home.
Those somebodies are farmers.
It can be hard to put a name on those somebodies, those farmers, because today, fewer than two Americans in a hundred farm for a living. But it wasn't always that way. When the first United States census was taken in 1790, about nine out of ten Americans lived and worked on farms.
That might be the single biggest change in how Americans live their daily lives, and most of us never think about it. We went from a country where almost everybody had dirt under their fingernails to one where almost nobody does.
For this Dispatch, I wanted to tell the story of how we went from a nation of farmers to a nation of eaters. I wanted to understand how we got here, and what we got in the bargain, and what we left behind.
In doing the research, there were so many numbers, so many stories, that I decided to simplify this Dispatch to one question to make it easy to understand: how many people does a single farm feed?
In 1790 the answer was basically this: a farm fed the family that worked it, with a little extra. Today the American Farm Bureau Federation figures that one U.S. farm feeds about 183 people a year, here and abroad.
We are going to meet seven families to get from 1750 to 2026. Let's start in a place where the work never stopped.
The Wheelers, Connecticut, 1750
Picture the Wheelers on a farm in the Connecticut River Valley around 1750. They're of English stock, third generation in America, working maybe a couple hundred acres, though a big chunk of that is woodlot and rough pasture, not tidy crops.
The thing to understand about the Wheelers is that the farm was not their job, it was their entire lives. There was almost no cash. They grew, raised, built, or traded for nearly everything they had.
Father Samuel and the older boys worked the fields and the animals, corn and rye, a few hogs, sheep for wool. Mother Hannah ran what was essentially a second business out of the kitchen and the dairy. She turned milk into butter and cheese that could keep, tended a large kitchen garden, and spun and wove the flax and wool into the family's cloth. The daughters worked beside her. The children had real chores by about age six. Nobody was idle, because idleness meant going without.
When they needed something they could not make, they traded labor with the neighbors, a practice they called "changing works," or they bartered surplus cheese and cider. And there was a lot of cider. In Massachusetts around 1700, the average person drank something like 35 gallons of hard cider a year, and roughly one New England farm in ten had its own cider press. Water could make you sick. Cider would not. Even the kids drank a watered-down version. Dinner was usually a one-pot affair, salt pork and beans stretched with cornmeal and whatever hardy vegetables were in the cellar.
What really shocked me as I was learning about these early New England farms was that it wasn't just free citizen landowners. There were actually enslaved people on New England farms. Not many compared to the South, around two or three percent of the regional population. Connecticut was the largest slave-owning New England colony, growing from about 1,000 enslaved people in 1740 to over 5,000 by 1774, in part because it had larger farms that wanted the labor.
It usually looked different than the plantation South. An enslaved man might live in the farmhouse and work the fields alongside the family that owned him. Different in scale and shape. Slavery all the same. The Wheelers didn't own any slaves on their 250-acre farm, but maybe their neighbors with 500 acres did. I thought that was something worth thinking about as we understand how America was built.
By the numbers: a New England farm, around 1750
- Mouths this farm feeds: its own household, plus a little to trade
- Share of Americans who farm: roughly 9 in 10
- Typical farm size: under 250 acres, much of it wood and rough pasture
- Hard cider per person, per year: about 35 gallons
The McKees, Ohio, 1805
Let's go west with the next generation. Not all the way to California, but to what was the west at that time: Ohio.
After the Revolution, families poured over the Appalachians into the Ohio Country. Picture the McKees, Scots-Irish, young and newly married, arriving around 1805 with a wagon, an axe, a few tools, and almost nothing else.
What they found was forest. Enormous, ancient, unbroken forest. And the only way to make a farm was to take it down by hand.
The first job was "girdling," cutting a ring of bark all the way around each tree so it would die standing. With the leaves gone and light reaching the ground, John McKee planted his first corn crop right in among the dead trunks and stumps. The next year he felled and burned the dead timber, and boiled the ashes into potash, a valuable fertilizer that's used to this day. This was often the very first thing a frontier family could sell for cash, and an example of the ingenuity, thriftiness, and hard work American farmers have always demonstrated. A family working hard might clear about seven acres in a year. Seven. Try to picture clearing seven acres of old-growth forest with an axe and a pair of oxen, and you start to understand these people.
Margaret McKee's work was its own kind of relentless. She cooked everything over an open hearth, made the clothes, preserved the food, doctored the family, hauled the water, and minded the babies, all in a one-room log cabin, often miles from the nearest neighbor. The loneliness was real and it was hard, and it fell heaviest on the women, who could go weeks without seeing another adult who wasn't family. The older children hauled, fetched, and watched the animals almost as soon as they could walk.
The McKees could settle here because of a couple of remarkable laws. The Land Ordinance of 1785 had carved the whole territory into a neat grid, townships six miles square, each split into thirty-six sections of 640 acres, with one section in every township set aside to fund local schools. That grid is still there. Fly over the Midwest today and those perfect squares below you were drawn in 1785. And the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set the rules for the territory, including Article VI, which banned slavery outright: there would be "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude" there.
While we can be proud that slavery was banned in this territory, there is the complicated fact that the land the McKees were "given" had belonged to someone else. The grid of 1785 and the farms that followed were drawn across ground taken from American Indians.
As with so many facts of American history, we can both be proud of the genuine opportunity for prosperity that was created and seized by millions of poor families who made the land their own through hard work and perseverance, while also acknowledging the sad fact that the dispossession of many others made that possible.
I don't know if there's a great way to reconcile those two facts, but I do think it's important to acknowledge.
By the numbers: an Ohio Country farm, around 1805
- Mouths this farm feeds: its own household, with a small surplus
- Share of Americans who farm: still roughly 9 in 10
- Forest a hard-working family could clear: about 7 acres a year
- Township grid: 36 sections of 640 acres each
The Hatchers & The Braxtons, Virginia, 1850
From Ohio, let's head back east to where the country was about to tear itself in half: Virginia.
In 1850, Virginia was a tale of two types of farmers. There was never just one type of Southern farm, and we'll take a look at both of them.
First, the Hatchers. They're a white family on a modest farm in the Virginia Piedmont, maybe 150 acres, growing corn and raising hogs, with a little wheat to sell. They owned no enslaved people. They worked their own land with their own hands, the whole family, the same as the Wheelers had a hundred years before in Connecticut. The wife and children were in the fields and the garden because there was no one else to do it. It was hard work to keep going, but they persisted.
Non-slave-owning families like the Hatchers were the majority of the white South. In the states that would secede, roughly two out of three families owned no enslaved people at all. About a third did. And even among those who did, ownership was lopsided. Nearly nine in ten slave owners held fewer than twenty people, and close to half held fewer than five.
But slavery was still common enough and concentrated enough to define the entire region. It set the politics, the economy, and the wealth of the South, even for the families who owned no one. While most families owned no one, power was so concentrated in the hands of the largest slaveholders that slavery ran the place anyway.
Just a few miles from the Hatchers live the Braxtons on a tobacco plantation in transition. By 1850, generations of tobacco had worn out the soil in eastern Virginia, so much that one famous Virginian had called the land "worn out" decades earlier, and many planters were shifting to wheat or selling their enslaved workers south to the booming cotton states. The Braxtons had made their wealth, and were now debating what to do with their farm. Even in the 1850s, trends and economic changes made farmers face hard decisions about how best to use their land.
While today the shift from tobacco to corn would mean retooling existing machines or maybe purchasing a new, different type of tractor, for the Braxtons, it meant having to consider what to do with their slaves. Real people. Picture a man named Isaac and his wife Dinah, owned by that plantation. They worked from before sunrise to after dark, in the tobacco and the corn. Dinah worked the fields and then came home to cook and care for her own children at night, after the day's labor was already done.
The whip was always a threat, but that wasn't what they were most afraid of: it was the trader's wagon. Because people like the Braxtons in 1850s Virginia were selling husbands away from wives and children away from mothers, and shipping them to the Deep South to the even more brutal cotton plantations that were thriving on slave labor.
What a complicated picture: one entirely free family working for themselves and struggling to keep going. One free family that owned an enslaved family. The free family made economic decisions that impacted not just their future, but the future of the people they owned.
It's an era of American farming I'm glad we have moved on from.
By the numbers: Virginia farms, around 1850
- Mouths a yeoman farm feeds: its family, plus a modest crop for market
- Share of Americans who farm: a little under two-thirds
- Biggest crops: tobacco, corn, and wheat (tobacco still king, but wheat rising fast)
- Southern families who owned no enslaved people: about 2 in 3
- Enslavers holding fewer than 20 people: nearly 9 in 10
The Bergs, Nebraska, 1875
Right in the middle of the Civil War, one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in American history was passed. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of public land to just about anyone willing to live on it and improve it for five years and pay a small filing fee. Free land. Millions of people came for it, including a wave of immigrants from all over Europe.
Picture the Bergs, Per and Kari, fresh from Norway, on the Nebraska prairie around 1875. The first shock was that there were no trees, which meant no logs for a cabin. So they did what their neighbors did and built their house out of the ground itself, cutting the thick prairie sod into bricks and stacking them into a "soddy." It was dark, and dirt fell from the ceiling, and snakes sometimes came through the walls, but it was warm in winter and cool in summer, and it was theirs.
Kari Berg, like a lot of homestead wives, basically ran a frontier survival operation. With Per breaking sod behind the oxen, she managed the garden, the chickens, the cooking, the children, and often the books, burning twisted grass and dried buffalo chips for fuel because there was no wood. On the homestead, women were not in the background. Many of them filed claims in their own names, and a great many farms would have simply failed without the wife holding it together. The children herded animals, hauled water, and watched the horizon.
And then, for a lot of these families, came the year the sky went dark. In 1874 and 1875, the Rocky Mountain locust descended on the Plains in numbers that are honestly hard to believe. One Kansas settler said the swarm looked like snowflakes coming down. Accounts from the time describe locusts eating the crops out of the ground, then the wool off live sheep and the clothing off people's backs, even gnawing the wooden handles of farm tools. In June 1875, a Nebraska doctor named Albert Child used telegraph reports to estimate the size of one swarm passing overhead. His figure, later cited by Guinness World Records, was a swarm covering something like 198,000 square miles, larger than the entire state of California, containing an estimated 12.5 trillion insects. It remains the largest concentration of animals ever recorded. Damage across the West ran to roughly $200 million in 1870s dollars. Farm ownership in parts of the Plains fell by half as families simply gave up and went home.
Farming is weather, and weather can be merciless. Only about 40 percent of homestead claims were ever "proven up." More than a million were abandoned. For every Berg family that made it, there was one that broke.
By the numbers: a Plains homestead, around 1875
- Mouths this farm feeds: its family, plus wheat for market
- Share of Americans who farm: about half
- The Homestead deal: 160 acres for 5 years' residence and a small fee
- Homestead claims that were "proven up": roughly 40%
- Albert's Swarm, 1875: an estimated 198,000 square miles, larger than California
The Hoffmanns, Wisconsin, 1900
Now we come to Wisconsin, and a story close to my own history, and this is the part of the story where technological innovation starts becoming a huge part of the American farming story, as fewer families farm and more mouths are fed by that shrinking number of families. Farms are becoming a business as America moves into the spotlight of the 20th century!
My ancestors all settled in Wisconsin as farmers in the 19th century. We're not going to tell their stories here, but researching this portion of this Dispatch was pretty fun for me!
As I researched, I learned that Wisconsin was not always dairy country, which surprised me a bit. From about 1840 to 1880, Wisconsin was a wheat state, growing about one-sixth of the nation's wheat and calling itself America's breadbasket. But wheat is hard on soil, it stripped the nitrogen out of the ground fast, and then chinch bugs came through and devoured the crops. The breadbasket was failing. So Wisconsin farmers made a pivot that built the state we know.
We now welcome the Hoffmanns, German immigrants living on a dairy farm in southern Wisconsin around 1900, maybe not so far from where our shop sits today. Their day was built around the cows, and it had no days off. They milked by hand, twice a day, every day, morning and night, all year. The whole family did it. Friedrich and the older sons and Luise and the kids, all of them, before school and after, in a barn that was bitterly cold in January. Even by 1960, the average Wisconsin dairy herd was still only about 27 cows, so a 1900 family farm was a small, intimate, exhausting thing. Luise turned the milk into butter and cheese, and the family lived in the rhythm of milking the way other people live in the rhythm of a clock.
What turned all this hand labor into an industry were a couple of legendary Wisconsin folks who put us on the path to being the Dairy State.
First, William Dempster Hoard, who founded the Wisconsin Dairymen's Association in 1872 and then the magazine *Hoard's Dairyman* in 1885, and basically preached dairy to the whole state, arguing that "king wheat" was finished and the dairy cow was the future. You can still read the magazine or enjoy cheese from the descendants of William's model herd!
And there was Stephen Babcock at the University of Wisconsin, who in 1890 invented a simple test to measure the butterfat in milk. That sounds boring until you realize what it did. Before the Babcock test, a dishonest farmer could water down his milk and get paid the same as an honest one. The test meant creameries could pay for quality, fairly, and it stopped the cheating cold. Babcock never patented it. He gave it away. Within a decade, more than nine out of ten Wisconsin farms kept dairy cows, and by 1915 Wisconsin led the country in butter and cheese. Today, the dairy plant at the University of Wisconsin is in Babcock Hall, and the commitment to quality and integrity pioneered by Babcock and others is a huge part of why our dairy industry is so highly regarded.
On, Wisconsin indeed!
By the numbers: a Wisconsin dairy farm, around 1900
- Mouths this farm feeds: its family, plus dairy and cheese for the region
- Share of Americans who farm: roughly 38 to 40%
- Milking schedule: by hand, twice a day, 365 days a year
- Average Wisconsin herd as late as 1960: about 27 cows
- Wisconsin farms keeping dairy cows by 1899: more than 90%
The Meyers, Kansas, 1940
Through the Great Depression and World War II, the pace of change picks up fast. Picture the Meyers, a Midwestern family on a corn-and-livestock farm around 1940, and notice how different their lives are from the Hoffmanns just forty years earlier.
Two great technological advances revolutionized the American farm in the middle of the twentieth century: the engine and the wire.
Start with the wire. As late as 1935, fewer than 11 farms out of 100 had electricity, even though most of the towns and cities did. Out in the country it was under 15 percent, against around 70 percent for Americans overall. Then in 1935 the federal government created the Rural Electrification Administration, and over the next years the power lines reached the farms. That changed everything inside the house and the barn. Electric lights. A milking machine instead of two hands. Refrigeration. A radio bringing the world into the kitchen. For a farm wife like Mrs. Meyer, electricity meant she was no longer hauling every drop of water and heating it on a stove, and her workload, which had been crushing for her grandmother, finally started to ease.
Then the engine. The tractor slowly replaced the horse and mule right around this era. One farmer put it simply: a tractor could do in a day what a team of horses did in a week. And once the horses were gone, farmers didn't need to grow oats to feed them anymore, which freed up huge amounts of land for crops people actually ate. Add hybrid seed corn and synthetic fertilizer, and yields took off. Corn that had been stuck under 40 bushels an acre for generations started a climb that hasn't stopped.
Between the tractor, the fertilizers, and the better communication links, the Meyers weren't just growing crops for themselves or their neighbors; they were growing crops to feed the world. Wheat was important for bread, but increasingly corn started to become king, as the land that previously had oats for horses now started growing corn for cattle. The scale meant that the Meyers weren't stuck selling in their local market; now, the entire world was their market!
In true American fashion, this progress had both positives and negatives associated with it. As we plowed up more and more of the southern Plains for wheat, we tore up grassland that had been untouched by humans for millennia. When the drought came, there was nothing to hold the soil, and it lifted into the sky in black blizzards you could see from hundreds of miles away. Today, we know it as the Dust Bowl, immortalized in *The Grapes of Wrath* and more. Tens of thousands of farmers were forced off their land and forced to find something else.
The Dust Bowl was a man-made disaster, but the response was also pure American problem-solving: the country invented modern soil conservation, taught farmers to plow along the contours and plant windbreaks and rest the land, and largely fixed what it had broken. Heartbreak, and then ingenuity. That's a pattern you see over and over in this story. Farmers always manage to figure it out.
While progress was wonderful for the Meyers, since every one of those machines did the work of several people, it meant fewer people were needed on the farm. The sons and daughters who were replaced by the machines moved to town for other work. For some, this was great news, as they didn't want to be tied to the family farm, and for others, it was sad news, but this is the exact moment the great exodus from the land speeds up. The farm got more productive and more lonely at the same time.
By the numbers: a family farm, around 1940
- Mouths one farmer now feeds: around 20, and climbing fast
- Share of Americans who farm: roughly 1 in 7 and falling
- Farms with electricity in 1935, before the REA: fewer than 11 in 100
- The tractor's edge: a day's work that once took a team a week
- Corn yields: beginning the long climb up from under 40 bushels an acre
The Johnsons & The Smiths, Iowa, 2026
Let's take one final, big leap forward and look at two farms. Just like the Hatchers and the Braxtons in Virginia in 1850 had two very different realities, we'll meet two Iowa farm families with different realities.
First, let's meet the Johnsons, an Iowa farm family working hard to feed America (and the world) today. The Johnsons are a culmination of hundreds of years of progress in agricultural practices. This one family is now running a few thousand acres of corn and soybeans in Iowa with basically themselves, one hired hand, and some seasonal help. Their combine drives itself by GPS, down to the inch. Their planter adjusts seed depth and spacing on the fly. The productivity is almost impossible to wrap your head around. Since 1948, total American farm output has nearly tripled, while the total amount of work going into it actually fell, with farm labor dropping about 76 percent. Fewer people, working less, growing far more.
The American Farm Bureau figures that one U.S. farm now feeds about 183 people a year, here and abroad. And food has become spectacularly cheap. In 1960, Americans spent around 17 percent of their income on food. By 2025 it was under 10 percent. That is one of the great quiet achievements in human history, and American farmers did it. Ingenuity, back-breaking work, and a lot of invested capital took a country that once needed nine in ten people in the fields and freed almost all of us to go do something else. You do not have to love every part of how it happened to stand back and call that astonishing. I do.
Those parts that not everyone loves - pesticide use, monoculture, and consolidation of industrial power - are why the second farm exists. So let's meet the Smiths.
The Smiths farm as a second job. Both Ted and Lisa grew up on multi-generational family farms, but saw that the economic reality of farming meant they had to be huge or get out. They moved off the farm, got other jobs, but always missed it.
However, as Americans started to revolt against the fact they didn't know who produced their food, the Smiths saw an opportunity. They took the money they had from their day jobs and purchased a small 15-acre farmette. They bought a third-hand tractor and started planting vegetables. Thanks to a local farmers market and community-supported agriculture, the Smiths are able to provide fresh, quality produce to people in their neighborhood.
The farm doesn't make money, it's a constant source of stress, but they believe in what they're doing and love being on the land.
Both the Johnsons & the Smiths are vitally important to American agriculture today.
The Johnsons and large-scale agriculture aren't evil. The Smiths and small farms like theirs can't feed a country on their own.
Together, they represent the complex, interconnected, and beautiful picture that is American agriculture today. I invite you to appreciate the accomplishment and scale that the Johnsons represent, while supporting the passion and diversity that the Smiths bring to our tables.
By the numbers: American farms, today
- Mouths one U.S. farm feeds: about 183 a year
- Share of Americans who farm: under 2%
- Number of U.S. farms: about 1.88 million, average 466 acres
- Output since 1948: nearly tripled, while farm labor fell about 76%
- Share of income Americans spend on food: about 17% in 1960, under 10% today
Where We Ended Up
So that's the journey. From the Wheelers grinding out their own survival in 1750, to the Johnsons feeding 183 strangers from the seat of a self-driving combine. From nine in ten of us on the land, to fewer than two in a hundred.
This Dispatch is a story of technological and societal progress, of complicated facts, and two-sided situations.
Fewer hands on the land. Fewer kids who grow up knowing a steer from a heifer. A whole country that mostly forgot the hard, weather-beaten, heartbreaking, miraculous work that puts dinner on the table. A farm industry that's increasingly concentrated in fewer hands and planting fewer varieties.
With that said, I can't help but see the story of the American farmer as anything but a massive triumph and testament to the great parts of America. Look at what these families did. The forest-clearers and the sodbusters and the dairymen milking in the dark, and the engineers and the seed scientists who came after them. They built a machine for feeding people that is unlike anything in the history of the world, and they did it on this ground, in a few short generations.
The next time you're buying food, take a moment and think of the incredible people that worked hard to bring you that food. Those people are farmers, and while they don't do it for the recognition, maybe just doff your cap at the next tractor you pass on the road. They earned that respect.
I'll talk to you next Sunday.
Cheers,
Nick
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