A question about the history of American agriculture

I was hit up with a question recently about the history of American agriculture and while I had an initial response, some facts poured in that challenged my initial beliefs.  I was wondering if anyone could offer any insights.


So the question was something along the lines of "When did the United States (or American Colonies) become net agricultural exporters?"  My initial understanding was that for the first few years after establishment of Jamestown and Plymouth Colony, the Colonies/United States had pretty much always been net exporters.  The reasoning was simple:  The Colonies/United States had a huge amount of land and a small population.  Its economy was largely dictated by agriculture and many, many immigrants came to the Colonies/United States in order to find new land for their own version of independence, thus adding to the agricultural surplus.  

But this morning I was faced with some contradictory evidence.  Among the dates/years given for agricultural export were:

About 1880--the reason being the development of the Transcontinental Railroad and the development of the Midwest

About 1915 due to WWI

About 1945-50 due to the effects of the end of WWII

And the latest was a listed as a sharp increase in agricultural exports that began in 1972 (Can anyone explain why 1972 was so important as opposed to 1971 or 1973?).



And some earlier years were

About 1620 after Jamestown and Plymouth Colony got established and didn't die from starvation! (This is a more traditional date)

About 1750-1754 due to conflict between England and France

About 1800-1815ish due to the French Revolution

About 1830 due to a combination of the opening of the Ohio Territory (Present-day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and a little bit of Minnesota) and still more conflict in Europe.

I am not trying to bear too much on wars/politics, but I do recognize that historically, when one country goes to war, its ability to grow its own food typically goes down while its need for food goes up (armies are hungry things).  Thus the relationship between conflict in Europe and American food exports is pretty easily visible.  That said, I was pretty convinced that during most of these years, American agriculture exports merely increased, but the United States did not turn from Ag importer to exporter.

I further understand that the exact definition of "Ag Exporter" differs by exactly how it is measured.  Probably the easiest to measure is also the most meaningless--by dollar value.  While that is convenient, it sometimes shows that the United States "imports" more luxury items like certain tropical fruits over more typical foodstuffs.  Also, sometimes, crops like cotton and tobacco are considered in the mix which certainly don't add to what one can eat.  Worse, those two items have prices that can fluctuate wildly and therefore the acreage planted probably changes--sometimes drastically--from year to year.

So if anyone has any insights that I have missed, please let me know!  I would love to hear what you know and what I thought I did!

Eric

Seems like a question without a clear answer.

I suspect the differing dates posited may have to do with differing definitions, which you already touched on. How many sources, for example, are actually looking at all agricultural products rather than food products? And are we looking at tonnage or at market value? And at what point does an item cease to be an “agricultural product” and becomes something else? Is molasses an agricultural product? White sugar? Rum?

For that matter, what is an export? Does trade between colonies or trade with tribal nations within the “boundaries” of a colony count as export? What about goods produced by or sold to squatters illegally settling in territory of another nation?

Maybe looking at the question of when did crops grown for export overtake those grown for domestic use, either by economic value or dedicated acres?

During the 1800s, forced slave labor and forced uprooting of native population of much of the country made plantation agriculture of cotton, sugar, and tobacco very profitable to the enslaving class. I do not know how much of these crops were exported in their raw state as opposed to being processed into manufactured goods or processed foods domestically, though.

I would guess that overseas trade in bulk agricultural commodities like grain and vegetables was not very profitable until 20th century. Ships were smaller and slower, spoilage was likely more of a problem. Probably why we read so much about trade in the high-value, low-spoilage luxuries like tea, distilled spirits, spices back in colonial times.

I would like to think that some of our relatives at both Plymouth, Mass or Jamestown, Virginia were the first farmers.

I ask Mr. Google because he is so smart:

According to current understanding, there wasn't a single "first farmer" in North America, but rather the practice of agriculture developed independently among various Native American groups, with the earliest evidence pointing towards the peoples of the American Southwest, including cultures like the Ancestral Puebloans (also known as the Anasazi), Mogollon, and Hohokam, who began farming crops like maize (corn) using irrigation techniques;.

I was also told that the history of American agriculture goes back 10,000 years:

According to available information, the first crops grown in the Americas were squash (particularly the bottle gourd), which were domesticated in the region around 10,000 years ago, followed closely by corn (maize), which was domesticated by the Olmec and Mayan people in Mexico, also around 10,000 years ago.

It kind of does. I know here in Maine one of our biggest agricultural commodities is Wild Blueberries. The American Indians here would "cultivate" the crop by burning the blueberry fields during times of drought. Burning blueberry fields is not only common, but really required every two years. The indians knew this and by doing so, the fire would spread past the blue berry barren and burn down the forest that the blueberries would take over.

There are farms up here now that harvest over 12,000 acres from this type of indiian cultivation.

Does that count? I am not sure.

I do know Lief Erickson once wrote about a "rocky coast that had fields of grapes". It is widely believed in 1010 he sailed what is now the Maine Coast and the grapes he thought he saw were really natural Maine blue berries.

I found this in an article about Sugar & the Rise of the Plantation System.

This is Brazil, not North America, so I'm not sure if it's what you had in mind for an 'American Colony'

Christopher Columbus (l. 1451-1506) had introduced sugar cane to the region on his second voyage of 1493. The Spanish were still much more interested in finding gold and silver, but they found the profit of sugar too enticing to pass up. They imported skilled sugar masters from the Canaries in 1515 and sent their first shipment of sugar to Europe soon after.

The Portuguese discovered Brazil in 1500, and it did not take them long to begin planting sugar cane there. The first sugar plantation was established in 1518, and by the late 1500s, Brazil had become the leading supplier of sugar to the European markets.

Anne, Steve,

Absolutely, agriculture in America dates back well prior to European colonization.  10,000 BC is as good a date as any by which to indicate a start date.

The crux of the question was about America being a net agricultural exporter.  And again, to be clear, I am mostly referring to the section of North America that would eventually become The United States.  By extension, this means that these lands would be English colonies, although some European colonies existed in these lands prior to European settlement (New York was New Amsterdam and Sweden even had a small colony.  Of course, these didn’t last.).

And again, my understanding was basically that after both Jamestown and Plymouth Colony figured out how to not starve (the first couple of winters were disastrous!), they figured out how to grow crops and general farming spread quickly.  As the lands in America were vast and the population small by contrast to Europe where the lands were close to their limits (no new lands to discover) and their population large, it was only natural that an agricultural surplus would form in America and flow to Europe.

Complimenting this trend (especially post American Independence) was the fact that America was land-rich (by total area, America was already one of the world’s largest nations), but cash poor.  Naturally, with a low population and large landmass, agricultural had tremendous potential, encouraged further by waves of European Immigrants who further added to American Agricultural output.

Or at least as I was always told.

Mitigating against this would be agricultural products like Coffee, which Americans (And this one in particular!) consume in very large quantities.  Technically America does produce some coffee—most from Hawaii—but this comes nowhere close to meeting demand so if agriculture exports are measured by dollars, then coffee counts dramatically against.  Other crops do similar things.  And so I have seen that American agriculture has teetered on a surplus (economically) thanks to various imports that are mostly a luxury (but please let me keep my coffee!!).

I find it hard to believe that America has had to import food calories for survival in centuries, though if someone could demonstrate otherwise, I would be fascinated!

And as for the 1972 oddity, I found several factors that contributed to a high demand for food in general, but this apparently struck doubly hard in the United States on that particular year, largely because the value of the dollar plummeted, making American exports overseas much cheaper.  This one reason does a lot to explain why 1972 in particular there was a sudden, drastic increase in American Agricultural exports.

Thanks for the input!  And of course, if you see anything that I missed or misunderstood, please fill me in.


Eric

Burra,

I was typing while you were responding.

Absolutely, Columbus and others introduced sugar cane to South America much earlier than the (English) American colonies.  And sugar cane was THE cash crop, perhaps for all time!  Sugar cane could expect increases in profits of about 25% annually for decades to centuries!  25% might sound average year-over-year, but when one considers the effects of compounding interest, this 25% made for tremendous wealth!

But sugar cane is a tricky crop.  It is temperamental about its climate and soil conditions.  Also, it was known as a rich-man’s crop because of its peculiar growth/cultivation characteristics.  When planting sugar cane, it was planted in a cleared field.  The little canes would grow and mature over the growing season.  At the end of the growing season, the canes (really a type of grass) would be burned down! The next year the canes would start growing again and then at the end of the second season they would be harvested.  This meant two years from planting to harvest!  If one had the money to wait two years for a payout, then sugar cane was a very profitable crop.  But few people could go that long without getting some type of income.

But you are absolutely correct Burra, in that South America was exporting large amounts of sugar cane for tremendous amounts of money about a century prior to the settlement of Jamestown.

Eric

I also found this in a book about American History, about rice in the Carolinas.

Rice and Slavery In the 1690s, Carolina’s colonists started exporting rice. They learned how to cultivate this crop from enslaved Africans, who had grown it in West
Africa. Growing rice required a large labor force. So planters imported more enslaved Africans to do the work.

Burra, you stumbled right into one of America’s more unsavory moments.  I won’t go into too much detail here, but the gist of things are that the colony “Carolina” (Precursor to both North and South Carolina) was a victualing colony for the Bahamas.  Essentially, the Bahamas was ideal for planting sugar cane, so perfect that practically every inch of ground was dedicated to growing sugar cane and none to food production.  Importing food from Europe was expensive so the leaders/owners of the Bahamas helped create the colony of Carolina as a victualing colony, or a colony dedicated for the food and survival of another.  And it turns out that what is now South Carolina was a great place to grow rice which was a delicacy in Europe (and the leaders of the Bahamas liked their European delicacies).

So right from its start, Carolina, and especially South Carolina was an agricultural exporter from inception.

Eric

Eric Hanson wrote:So right from its start, Carolina, and especially South Carolina was an agricultural exporter from inception.

History is generally a bit of a mystery to me, but I've been having a lot of problems with waking up in the night and not being able to fall back to sleep and tend to play audiobooks from The Great Courses one chapter at a time so that they either knock me back to sleep (I choose ones with male speakers, and ideally boring speech patterns and relatively boring subject matter - if it interests me too much I just perk up and listen too intently) or I can at least listen and learn something. I recently listened to a great long course on the History of the United States and, whilst trying hard to avoid politics, it struck me that while many individuals made the journey across the pond to escape past lives and build something new, the governments involved seemed to view the whole exercise as a way to exploit the new lands and profit from them, either by gold or agricultural products. So there was a huge emphasis, especially in what would later become the southern states near the Atlantic, on setting up huge, productive farms to support the aim of exporting to line their own pockets. So export was somewhat built in to the agenda, by whatever means they deemed necessary.  

The latest course I listened to was about Confucius, which I found less depressing.

Burra,

Regarding the reasoning for emigration/immigration, what you said is partly correct—many people came to the Americas for financial gain.  In a way, this only makes sense.  What exactly would motivate a person to pull up all the stakes and leave home behind—for good!!  There was little chance of going back and little connection to their previous home once making the journey across the Atlantic.  So some sort of financial gain was almost always a motivation for all voluntary migration.

Of course, financial gain looks different to everyone.  For a European surf, simply being able to own the land one worked (back-breaking work) was substantial incentive.  For someone wealthier, it would take quite a financial incentive to leave home behind.  Sugar certainly could have been one of those options.

And of course there were religious and political refugees who had different motivations, but a better life was still central.

At any rate, what most of these immigrants had in common for centuries was some type of dream that involved land ownership and independence.  At any rate individual level, independence almost always meant some type of agricultural activity with a surplus.  American was a good place starting new agricultural lands, having plenty of acreage of bountiful land with a good climate.  This was even better once the Appalachian mountains were crossed as the river system leading to the Mississippi was vast and navigable.  So it is little surprise that the United States became a net exporter early in its history.

The more I think about this question, the more I conclude that The United States was an agricultural exporter much earlier than around 1880.  No doubt the railroad and opening of the Midwest drastically increased American surplus, but I am convinced that these only increases a surplus that had always been there.

Eric

Our ancestors settled in Charles City, Virginia across the river from Jamestown.  These folks

grew tobacco. This was in the 1600s.

What I have seen is that families in England sent one son to Virginia and another to Massachusetts.  It is my theory that the family wanted to cash in on the selling of goods to both colonies and to the export of agriculture goods. It is my understanding that Jamestown also exported tobacco.

The primary goods exported from the Plymouth Colony were fur, fish and lumber.

I ask Mr Google about exporting corn and he said that corn was exported before 1720 to the West Indies to pay for imported goods.

Very good Anne!!

Absolutely, Jamestown definitely grew and exported tobacco.  And strange as it may seem, tobacco actually saved hundreds to thousands of lives and saved Jamestown from oblivion.  Basically, tobacco became **THE** export crop for the United States.  It commanded a very high price in Europe and thus drew in vast sums of money to a colony that was on the verge of extinction.

And all the crops you mentioned were absolutely typical of the crops that would have come out of New England at that time.

Also, lumber was in constant demand in England during this time as England had the world’s largest navy which was of course made of lumber up until the 20th century.  And England had long run out of large forests as a source of lumber.  Naturally, they saw the vast forests of North America as a tremendous resource.

Eric

I'm not going to look it up, but I wonder if the jump in food exports in 1972 might have been related to sending food aid overseas (to Russia, for example)?  That would give someone another angle to research, at least.  

And I've got things to do, may check back in later!

I've been watching the various BBC series on Victorian, Edwardian, and Wartime (WWII) farms. It's pretty clear that by the Edwardian period, 1890s forward, farmers in Britain had to pivot to livestock production because they could not compete with the cheaper cereal grain exports from North America. This would certainly be consistent with the exploding settlement of arable land in the Canadian Prairies of the period. I believe American agriculture was maturing before that -- so much so that some Americans sold their farms pre-WWI and moved north to Canada so their sons could have land.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:I've been watching the various BBC series on Victorian, Edwardian, and Wartime (WWII) farms. It's pretty clear that by the Edwardian period, 1890s forward, farmers in Britain had to pivot to livestock production because they could not compete with the cheaper cereal grain exports from North America. This would certainly be consistent with the exploding settlement of arable land in the Canadian Prairies of the period. I believe American agriculture was maturing before that -- so much so that some Americans sold their farms pre-WWI and moved north to Canada so their sons could have land.

1890s was when transatlantic steamships really took off, probably made grain shipments more profitable than previously.