Iowa: Corn, Ice Cream, and the Prairie That Was

Iowa was tallgrass prairie. That is the first fact. Before European settlement, virtually all of Iowa was covered by a prairie ecosystem that extended from the Canadian border to Texas, grass reaching eight feet in height, root systems extending twenty feet into the soil, inhabited by bison herds numbering in the millions and sustaining Indigenous communities for thousands of years.

Less than one tenth of one percent of that prairie remains. The rest is corn and soybeans. Iowa produces roughly a fifth of the nation's corn crop and roughly a fifth of its soybean crop.

The soil that makes this production possible is the best agricultural soil on earth, deep, dark, nitrogen-rich topsoil deposited by the prairie over millennia. It is the prairie's inheritance, being consumed at a rate that is not replenished in any human time frame. The town of Le Mars, well north of Interstate Eighty in Plymouth County, calls itself the Ice Cream Capital of the World, and the claim is legitimate: Wells Enterprises, which produces Blue Bunny ice cream, is headquartered there and has been since nineteen thirteen.

The annual per capita ice cream production in Le Mars is a number that the company's marketing team has made into a point of civic pride. The Ho-Chunk Nation, the Sauk, the Meskwaki, and the Ioway people all inhabited what is now Iowa. The Meskwaki, also called the Sac and Fox of the Mississippi in Iowa, managed to purchase their own land in Tama County in eighteen fifty-six, a rare case of a tribe buying back a portion of its homeland rather than being given a reservation.

They still live there.