The Corn and Soybean State, Indiana's Agricultural Economy

Drive almost anywhere in Indiana outside the cities and the industrial corridor along Lake Michigan, and eventually the land flattens and the crops take over. Indiana sits squarely in the heart of the American Corn Belt, a band of extraordinarily fertile glaciated soil running from Ohio west to Nebraska that produces more grain per acre than almost any comparable region on earth. The glaciers that covered Indiana repeatedly over the past two million years left behind a gift when they retreated: they ground ancient rock into fine mineral-rich till and deposited it across the state's midsection in a layer thick enough to farm indefinitely.

Indiana is routinely among the leading corn-producing states, growing somewhere between eight hundred million and one billion bushels in a good year. It is also a major soybean state. It was a crop that arrived in American agriculture relatively late, expanding dramatically after World War Two as demand for protein-rich animal feed and vegetable oil drove acreage north from the South.

Today corn and soybeans occupy more than ten million acres of Indiana farmland, roughly half the state's total land area. The farm economy shapes Indiana politics, infrastructure, and social geography in ways that are invisible from the interstate but unmistakable once you slow down. The grain elevator is the civic monument of rural Indiana, visible from miles away across flat fields.

The county fair is the social institution that holds small towns together in August. The Farm Bureau is among the most powerful lobbying organizations in the state. Ethanol refineries anchor rural economies across the corn belt.

What the land produces here has fed the nation and filled export ships since before the Civil War. The efficiency of modern commodity agriculture is astonishing and sometimes unsettling: two people and a satellite-guided GPS tractor can plant and harvest a thousand acres that once employed twenty families. The yield per acre has climbed several fold since nineteen fifty, while the number of farmers has fallen sharply.