The Wheat Economy: Brown County's Agricultural Engine

Brown County, of which Aberdeen is the seat, has been one of the most productive agricultural counties in South Dakota for nearly a century and a half. But the crop has shifted, the technology has transformed, and the number of people required to work the land has collapsed in ways the original homesteaders could not have imagined.

The first wave of settlement in the eighteen eighties was driven by wheat. Hard red spring wheat grew well in the northern plains climate, and the railroads made it possible to ship grain to Minneapolis mills and from there to global commodity markets. By the mid eighteen eighties, Brown County farmers were putting large acreages into spring wheat, and Aberdeen's grain elevators were among the busiest on the Milwaukee Road's northern line.

The droughts of the eighteen eighties and nineties, and again the catastrophic Dust Bowl years of the nineteen thirties, taught harsh lessons about monoculture. Farmers who survived diversified. Flaxseed, oats, and sunflowers entered the rotation. After the Second World War, soybeans became an increasingly important crop in the eastern tier of South Dakota, better suited to the slightly higher rainfall near the Minnesota border.

Today Brown County produces corn, soybeans, wheat, and sunflowers across a large share of the county. The sunflower crop is a particular point of regional pride: South Dakota competes with North Dakota for the title of the leading sunflower-producing state in the country, and Brown County sits near the heart of that production zone.

What has changed most is the scale of the machinery and the scale of the farms. A single modern combine can harvest in one hour what took a crew of men with horse-drawn equipment an entire day in nineteen ten. The farms are larger, the families fewer, and the small towns that once served those families are quieter than they were a generation ago.