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2.1 - Overview

In this chapter we will explore the previous claim of farmland being released into metro areas and how a change in industrialization and technology is shaping farming as well as the landscape of development.The following telling of agro-industry is piecemeal subtracted from The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia.

The most fundamental and enduring image of the Midwest is that of agricultural productivity. It is inseparable from the Corn Belt, the heartland of agriculture that stretches from Ohio to the Great Plains. The breadbasket is more than a simply a production system; essential to it are the social and settlement systems that support production. Midwestern farms in the American imagination are operated by families who are dedicated to their land and to farming as a way of life. The Jeffersonian ideal – the yeoman farmer who operate in a specific context – small, vibrant family farms are set in a landscape of picturesque small towns. The Midwest is envisioned as a rural environment, despite the historic role of the region’s cities and the key role of its major metropolitan regions to this day. The idealized image, representing self-sufficiency and self-reliance, individualism and independence, and traditional family and community structures, may be descended from the yeoman’s farms found in the Midwest during the nineteenth century. [Image 8] Grant Wood’s American Gothic

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