In this blog, originally polished as a ‘Snapshot’ in Environment and History (May 2026), J. Jacob Jones traces the small beginnings of the soybean agro-industry and the profound change that came with agricultural mechanisation in Indiana.
On a late summer day in l921, Benton County, Indiana Agricultural Extension Agent P.T. Brown photographed an attentive but sceptical-looking collection of farmers sitting beneath the trees of C.C. Bower’s farmyard, having just participated in one of hundreds of ‘field days’ organised across the state that decade to promote a new hay, forage and nitrogen-restoring crop for the state: soybeans. Why sceptical? Well, prior to Bower’s test plot, no Benton County farmers had ever been known to grow soybeans, and only a limited group of ‘pioneer’ growers were planting them anywhere in the United States at the time. And, unlike the state’s main cash crops – corn, wheat and oats – soybeans had as yet no off-farm market except to sell seed to other farmers experimenting with the crop.[1]
Despite those initial limitations, by 1939 Benton County had become the largest soybean-producing county in Indiana, and Indiana had become the third-largest soybean-producing state in the US, which, three years later, surpassed China and Manchuria to become the world’s largest producer. Meanwhile, a whole new regional infrastructure of elevator complexes and shipping terminals, oil and meal processing plants, farm implement manufacturers and research facilities had arisen to service the crop, becoming thereby key components in what agricultural historian Deborah Fitzgerald and others have labeled the ‘industrialization’ of US agriculture in the pre-WWII decades.[2]
What happened in such a brief period to convince so many midwestern farmers about the merits of growing soybeans as a cash crop? First, soybeans came along at an opportune time to offset steadily declining demand for oats amidst the ongoing transition from horsepower to cars, trucks and tractors. Additionally, newly-developed uses for soybean oil in food products, industrial applications (paints, plastics) and as a protein-rich soycake for commercial livestock feeds all added to the growing off-farm market for the beans, while a 1928–29 soybean price guarantee offered by Illinois and Indiana oil millers helped kickstart the processing industry at a crucial moment. Then, a restrictive 1930 tariff on soy-oil imports and New Deal efforts to boost farm incomes by reducing acreage in overproduced commodities like corn and cotton opened up additional land for soybeans. But the decisive factor in determining when or whether midwestern farmers would decide to devote more of their acreage to growing soybeans for the market was the advent of the combined harvester thresher or ‘combine’.[3]
‘No other way to harvest them’
Indeed, Indiana farmers had learned quickly that if they wanted to grow soybeans to sell as a cash crop, they would need something other than the reaper/binder and threshing machine they had long used with wheat, oats and other small grains to harvest their soybeans. The higher-cutting reapers designed for taller wheat and oats plants often missed many of the soybeans growing close to the ground, with many more beans lost in the handling process. In fact, soybean harvest losses averaged thirty per cent or more with the binder/thresher method, and that lost revenue, on top of typical operating costs, weighed heavily on any potential profit from the crop.[4]
The combine, however, could thresh and winnow both soybeans and small grains with just a tractor driver to pull the machine through the field and someone in a truck or horse-drawn wagon to regularly collect the grain or beans and drive them to the local elevator. By the early 1930s meanwhile, farm-implement engineers and manufacturers had brought the standard cutter-bar width down to 7–10 feet, then as narrow as 5–6 feet with a new range of ‘baby’ combines up from 1935. They had also made the machines light enough to be pulled by the smaller Corn Belt tractors, added tyres for easier transport, and designed the cutting mechanisms to reach as low as two inches from the ground, thereby catching most of the soybeans that earlier machines had missed. Combine prices also fell from $950–$2,250 for the larger models in the late 1920s to as little as $595 dollars for the smaller machines.[5]
The newest combines reduced average soybean harvest losses to less than ten per cent which, when added to the 50–75 per cent savings in labour costs versus the old methods, led even the most cautious experts to argue by 1939 that Indiana farmers would be ‘justified in owning’ their own small combine even if they had only 65 harvestable acres of soybeans and small grains. Those same experts also noted that if the new combine owner could do contract/ ‘custom’ harvesting for their not-yet-combine-owning neighbours, they could probably pay for their machine in two years. Nevertheless, fewer than five per cent of Indiana farmers owned a combine in 1940 and, that year, just under half of the Corn Belt’s soybean acreage was still being used for hay, forage and green manure rather than for sale off the farm.[6]
The US government’s World War II ‘Food for Freedom’ campaign boosted those off-farm figures significantly. Worried about the supply of fats, oils and proteins needed to maintain a vastly expanded military in the field as well as domestic needs and military allies, Washington called on American soybean farmers to increase acreage by at least fifty per cent, and they set a guaranteed price almost ‘double … the prewar year’ to encourage that expansion. As the leading soybean-producing region, the Midwest responded to the call, adding almost three million soybean acres between 1941 and 1945, with over 85 per cent harvested as beans for processing rather than on-farm uses. In four of those years, Benton County was Indiana’s leading soybean producer and, by 1945, one-third of Benton County farms had a combine too, while Indiana farmers overall had almost doubled their combine inventory despite war-time limitations on farm-equipment manufacture. Given that six million Americans left the farm during the war years to join the military or work in war-production, the nation’s farmers might not have been able to meet war-time production goals at all without labour-saving farm machinery like the combine.[7]
‘Shoving farmers along the road to mechanization’?
Largely because of that mechanisation and ‘industrialisation’, however, most of those who left the land during the war would ‘never be able to return to an adequate livelihood in farming’, agricultural economist James Street contended in 1946. ‘Power-drawn equipment usually means the need for a larger farm’ and/or ‘the consolidation of landholdings’, he explained, which spread the costs of the investment over a larger acreage. Yet that process also pushed many farm families and agricultural workers off the land, threatening ‘to disrupt our entire mode of rural life’ and the ‘family-sized, fully-owned farm’ that had been the ‘American ideal’ since the nation’s founding.[8]
Such was certainly the case in Indiana, where tens of thousands of small and medium-sized farms had already disappeared even before the end of the war, mostly because they ‘had insufficient output to generate the capital necessary to purchase new equipment’, like the combine. These trends have continued down to the present. Benton County farmers, for example, still cultivate almost the same overall acreage as they did during the war, but the county’s farms, already twice the state average in 1945, have more than doubled in size in the intervening decades while the number of farmers has dropped by more than two-thirds. Nonetheless, it remains the largest soybean-producing county in Indiana by yield, while Indiana is still the third-leading soybean-producing state in the US. Like much of the rest of the corn and soybean belt, that continued productivity has been achieved by huge increases in farm capitalisation, from ever-larger machines to genetically-engineered seeds as well as herbicides, insecticides and fungicides and the private debt and government subsidies which help(ed) finance them.[9]
Critics of this highly-mechanised, ‘high-input’ industrial farming model argue that the ‘constant race for increases in productivity … and record-high yields’ has resulted not only in ‘extensive depopulation’ but also ‘exhausted soils’ and ‘contaminated hydrological systems’ (Indiana and Benton County farms have experienced both) with ‘family farms’ so dependent on the ‘corporate-agri-food system’ that the Midwestern ‘corn and soy belt’ has become nothing more than a ‘horizontal factory … converting energy into livestock’. Conversely, supporters of modern food production systems argue that the industrialisation of US and indeed much of the world’s farming over the last century has not only fed the burgeoning global population abundantly, but freed millions of people to pursue other vocations rather than spending their lives tied to the hard labour of raising food.[10]
Meanwhile, both Street and many commentators since have argued that mid-century US farmers were essentially compelled to mechanise or leave farming altogether, while historian J.L. Anderson and others contend that, despite continuous pressure from ‘agricultural extension professionals, advertisers, manufacturers, and journalists’ who ‘pleaded’ for farmers to become more modern and efficient, it was the farmers themselves ‘who made the decisions to alter the midwestern landscape’. That over half of Indiana farmers were growing soybeans by 1940 while less than five per cent owned a combine indicates they had listened to the decades-long drumbeat of expert advice about the crop, but remained cautious about purchasing expensive machinery. Nevertheless, when offered a government-guaranteed market and price point for soybeans during World War II, those farmers who could scrounge up the cash or credit to buy a combine did so, and they continued to purchase ever more mechanical and chemical inputs and buy or rent more land in the postwar decades to stay competitive. Those farmers who could not or would not climb on that ‘agricultural treadmill’ left the land to their larger-scale, more industrialised neighbours, which was in fact the goal of many of those agricultural leaders Anderson lists. We are all still living with the consequences of their success in doing so.[11]
[1] Annual Report of County Agricultural Agent: Benton County, 1921, 1932; 14th U.S. Census (1920):Vol VI-Part 1 (1922), pp. 331, 334; pioneers, Edward Jerome Dies, Soybeans: Gold From the Soil (New York: Macmillan, 1943), p.4; seed sales, ‘Soybeans’, Purdue Agriculturist 17(2) (Nov. 1922); major cash crops (1925), Indiana Crops and Livestock: Annual Crop Summary [ICL] 1925, p.16.
[2] Benton County, ICL 1940, p.11; and ICL 1941, pp.12–13; William Shurtleff and Akiki Aoyagi, ‘History of world soybean production and trade – part I’, Soyinfo Center (2004); Dies, Soybeans; Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
[3] Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, ‘Reshaping the landscape: The impact and diffusion of the tractor in American agriculture, 1910–1960’, The Journal of Economic History 61 (3) (2001): 663–98; Matthew Roth, Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018); Ines Prodöhl, Globalizing the Soybean: Fat, Feed, and Sometimes Food, c. 1900–1950 (Routledge, 2024).
[4] Combines vs. harvester/thresher, J.J. Reynoldson et al., Harvesting Small Grain, Soybeans, and Clover in the Corn Belt with Combines and Binders, USDA Tech. Bull. 244 (May 1931); and J.C. Bottum et al., Economic Study of Harvesting with the Small Combine in Indiana, Purdue Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin #436 (April 1939).
[5] Bottum et al., Economic Study, p.3
[6] Ibid., pp. 8, 15; E.F. ‘Soybean’ Johnson, ‘General review of the domestic soybean situation’, Proceedings of the ASA (1940); two years, Reynoldson et al., Harvesting Small, p. 50; ICL, 1939-45; Edwin G. Strand, Soybean Production in War and Peace, USDA Ag. Econ. Bull. (Sept. 1945), p. 9.
[7] William Shurtleff and Akiki Aoyagi, ‘History of world soybean production and trade – part II’, Soyinfo Center (2004); Alvin A. Munn, ‘Production and utilization of the soybean in the United States’, Economic Geography 26 (3) (July 1950): 223–34; U.S. Census of Agriculture1940, 1950 and ICL, 1940–1945; Strand, Soybean Production, p. 9; James M. Street, ‘The tractor revolution’, The Atlantic (June 1946).
[8] Quotes (including subheading), Street, ‘Tractor revolution’ and R. Douglas Hurt, ‘Mechanization in agriculture’, in Jeannie Whayne (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 191–208.
[9] Barbara J. Steinson, ‘Rural life in Indiana, 1800–1950’, Indiana Magazine of History 90 (3)(Sept. 1994): 203–50, quote on 217. State and Benton #s, 1920–1950 and 2022 U.S. Agricultural Census; Indiana, https://soystats.com/u-s-yield-production-production-by-state/; Benton County, Hoosier Ag Today (15 May 2025).
[10] Nikos Katsikis, ‘The horizontal factory. The operationalisation of the US corn and soy belt’, in Christian Schmid and Milica Topalovic (eds), Extended Urbanisation: Tracing Planetary Struggles (Berlin, Boston: Birkhäuser, 2023), pp.121–58; ‘Indiana State Nutrient Reduction Strategy’, Indiana Department of Agriculture (2020): https://www.in.gov/isda/divisions/soil-conservation/indiana-state-nutrient-reduction-strategy/ . For ‘positivist’, John K. Shueller, ‘In the service of abundance’, Mechanical Engineering 122 (8) (Aug. 2000): 58–65.
[11] John L. Anderson, Industrializing the Corn Belt (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), pp. 11–12; U.S. Agriculture Census, 1940, ICL, 1944-45; Neil Ward, ‘The agricultural treadmill and the rural environment in the post-productivist era’, Sociologia Ruralis 33 (3/4) (1993): 348–64; purposeful, Fitzgerald, Every Farm, p. 92.
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