Agriculture is big business in McLean County. It produces $457 million in grain and livestock each year and billions in spinoff economic impact. Ag production in McLean County tops every Illinois county and is in the top 4% of counties nationwide.
But it wasn't always that way. And those new to the area probably don't know how the county got where it is. As part of our ongoing Welcome Home series, WGLT dives into the history of agriculture in McLean County.
Where to begin. Corn, right? Corn and beans are where it's at. How far back does that go?
“We know they were growing corn here about 1300 A.D. at the Noble-Wieting site in southern McLean County. Very small, maybe 2- or 3-inch ears of corn are found. It wasn't like today's corn by any means, but they were growing corn,” said local historian Greg Koos.
Corn as we know it today started in about 1900 but wasn't widely accepted until 1930. Ag historian Don Meyer said it's called hybrid corn, developed by crossbreeding different strains of the grain to suit different conditions.
“Until that time, a yield of 30 bushels per acre of corn was considered good. The corn was short. The ears were small. It was very much not what we think of today with 200-plus yields of corn per acre. But hybrid corn was a big change for us in history, in the 1930s,” said Meyer.
A variety called Reids Yellow Dent corn (named for a dent in the kernel) was developed in neighboring Tazewell County near Delavan. Meyer said the other major hybrid was called Krug corn.
“It had a little more of a red tinge to it and the Pfister family used that corn. The Funks kind of had the Yellow Dent and promoted that and Pfisters had the Krug corn. Together today they're intermixed. We're using a combination and getting the best of both worlds,” said Meyer.
The Funk family and the Pfister family still have their names on seed companies.
“I think you could trace a lot of the success of corn around the world right here to the middle of Illinois,” said Meyer.
Special soil
Lots of places grow corn. McLean County just does it better than most. So, to get to the origins of ag, maybe we should look earlier than 1900 or even 1300, maybe say 13,000 to 18,000 years ago.
“The gifts that we've been given by mother nature, the wind-blown topsoil, that followed the glaciers are what makes McLean County such a great place to grow crops,” said Meyer.
That pretty darn good soil holds moisture, but it's loose and doesn't clump. Meyer said plants like it a lot.
“We have pockets of soil that are among the best. Soils in Illinois are rated on a scale. The highest score you can get for soils — it's called a productivity index — is 147. And we have a lot of farms that average in McLean County 140-143. That's a really strong average,” said Meyer.
Even after the glaciers receded, Native Americans had been killed or thrown out and settlers moved in, a big chunk of McLean County’s 600,000 acres of farmland wasn't that great for farming. The prairie parts were actually fairly swampy. Early settlers picked the high ground near timbered areas that were more Savannah than prairie. Early farmers didn't want to get their feet wet, and they wanted trees nearby to cut to build their homes. Don Meyer said it wasn't until the 1880s that they started draining the swamp land.
“We dug trenches. We dug drainage ditches. We connected to creeks. And then, of course, heated clay tile began being developed. We had tile factories around McLean County. There are literally millions of miles of tile underneath farms. The installation started in 1880 and still occurs today. We're now using plastic tile,” said Meyer.
Probably 25,000 acres of McLean County land was unfarmable until drainage. Today that land is among the best. Early farmers, say 1820-1845, grew foods that they knew: potatoes, cabbage, oats, barley. They were hunter gatherers like the Native Americans before them. They harvested nuts and berries. They made maple syrup, just like Native Americans. And like Native Americans, early European settlers were doing subsistence agriculture.
“The first 30 or so years of McLean County, it was simply feeding your family and surviving the winter,” said Meyer.
There's one big difference between early settler and Native American ag, though. Historian Greg Koos said European immigrants raised animals — sheep for the wool for household products and for trade goods, and pigs.
“Hogs were essentially a way of exporting the corn crop,” said Koos.
In the words of one wit in the 1840s, "There were barely roads in Illinois, just places they called roads." Koos said getting grain to market was nearly impossible.
“But what you could do is feed corn to pigs and you could drive those pigs to market, or you could smoke hams, process them that way, or some people early on got into the business of making salt pork and packing pork,” said Koos.
There was a salt pork production center at Pekin, for instance. The best-known hog drover in McLean County was Isaac Funk, who settled south of Bloomington-Normal.
“Funk had 3,000 head of half-wild hogs in Funks Grove. Now that helps us also explain why Funk didn't have a lot of competition about buying land around there. Because who wants to pick up 100 acres of land when there's 3,000 half-crazy hogs wandering around, you know?” said Koos.
Hence the name Funks Grove. Funk drove hogs to Galena, to Chicago, and even to Cincinnati.
“How do you drive hogs? First of all, you got to be mean. Secondly, you do it in the wintertime. You do it in February because that's when packing is done (so meat doesn’t spoil in heat). And the way they did it was to lay a river of corn and then hogs, the Judas hogs, would follow that corn and the other hogs would follow behind,” said Koos.
Technology arrives
Then the railroads came. That's about 1853. It became possible to get grain to large markets, not just hogs. Townships organized and built roads to make it easy for farmers to get to their fields and bring crops to market. The railroads also made it possible to create and haul larger pieces of farm equipment, said Koos. Until 1853 or so it wasn't so easy to get the cutting-edge tech for those days out to farms.
Today, we talk about the hollowing of rural America, as people move to cities and away from the land. That started longer ago than you might think. Meyer said the peak farm population in McLean County came in the 1890s. There were 5,500 farmers in McLean County then. There are less than half that now. More technology meant fewer people could do the same work. Farmers needed less hired labor and less time to farm.
Technology also affected land ownership. Koos said by 1890, McLean County had the highest tenancy rates of any area outside the Delta region of the South. He said tenancy gives employment, but it does not create generational wealth. Much as Illinois settlers came from Ohio and points east looking for a way to prosper in McLean County, Koos said McLean County tenant farmers often left.
“In the 1890s, we had hundreds of farm families leave McLean County. Many of them had been tenant farmers, with enough money in their pocket and enough of a track record of doing this kind of work, that they went into western Iowa and bought farmland at about anywhere from a half to a third of the cost it was selling for in McLean County,” said Koos.
Technology also helped redefine what we think of as a farm. Koos said with an early wooden or iron walking plow, maybe you'd be able to cultivate 40 acres. Threshing machines, better plows driven by oxen, and then horses brought that number higher, say to 80 acres, and up to the cultural notion of a quarter section, a traditional 160-acre family farm. Even that's outdated. Tractors expanded the ability of a single family to work land even more. Today, families may have their home patch of a quarter section. But to make a go of a business, they are probably renting and working 1,000 to 1,200 more acres, said Meyer.
Today, the railroad network still helps ship things north, east, and west. The rivers, the Illinois and Mississippi, make it easy to send grain both corn and soybeans south to New Orleans and anywhere in the world in a few weeks. Meyer said that's big for humans and for livestock.
“Even though central Illinois doesn't grow as much livestock as we did back in the day. We are feeding a lot of the livestock in Mexico. We're feeding livestock in the Carolinas and elsewhere from corn and soybeans grown here in the Midwest,” he said.
Other crops
In the 1800s, census records show McLean County was growing fruit trees, vegetables, potatoes, a cornucopia of products. Even as late as the 1950s, McLean County was growing a variety of crops.
Meyer remembers at least four on his family's land when he was growing up. Now it's mainly corn and beans.
“The supply chain and the marketing chain. To me those two together have dictated how we've evolved, just like in manufacturing. What people depend on us for is corn and soybeans, while we bring in our produce from other parts of the country. They're more labor intensive. And our most efficient crops to grow, right now, are corn and soybeans,” he said..
Niche markets are evolving in McLean Count. Some ag producers are going back to more labor-intensive practices to grow vegetables, organic products, and specialty crops. That's tough since family sizes have declined and low-cost labor is hard to find. Those that do try specialty crops mostly sell locally or regionally.
For producers hooked into the global ag markets, computers in farm equipment cabs now track many of the things farmers used to have to do by hand. Don Meyer said there's more leisure driving the combine than ever before, or even letting the computer drive.
Yet farmers today are not just technologists who know how to set up increasingly automated operations. They are financial and business experts, too. Meyer said they have to manage their input costs, how they market, when they sell for an advantageous price, and how the swings in the average price of farmland affect their ability to borrow to get the next crop in the ground.
“Today's farmers are more technology and finance savvy than they are perhaps agronomically savvy,” said Meyer.
When you think about so-called factory farming, Meyer suggested you consider the trade-offs as McLean County farmers have done for a couple centuries now. He noted you may wish you could grow crops without pesticides or significant amounts of fertilizers. But you also want inexpensive restaurant meals and groceries. To get one, you need the other.
About 85% of the land in McLean County is farmland; 15% is towns, cities, roads and bodies of water. The 2017 Ag Census shows an average value of McLean County farmland is $11,000 to $14,000 per acre. It's up a lot since then. Some sales top $20,000 an acre, and $18,000 is not uncommon. Yet the outlay for fertilizer, equipment, seed, and other elements of a modern farm is so high, virtually no farmers operate without bank loans.
Don Meyer said the more generations people are away from the farm, the less understanding there is about what agriculture really means. And for newcomers to McLean County. Meyer said we can't fully appreciate today without knowing what came before.
