Sitting back and watching as entire eras come and go…

I was born in 1946 with the first tranche of the Baby Boom generation that’s been distorting the nation’s demographics and economics for the past 70 years. But beyond that, the immediate post-World War II era was an interesting one because of the great changes it both caused and experienced.

Millions of service men and women were released from military service and headed home to try to pick up the lives the war had disrupted. Congress helped by passing the various G.I. Bills and that allowed many of those ex-soldiers, sailors, and marines to buy homes and to go to college as well.

Unless they were Black, of course. Those new laws were cleverly written to make sure most Black veterans would be prohibited from buying homes with no down payment or getting college degrees. The resulting loss of accumulated wealth has been a continual drain on Black advancement for the last 70 years.

In the rural area of northern Illinois where I grew up, agriculture was undergoing change even before the war. Everything seemed to take a pause during the war years before getting back into gear when the war ended.

Lyle Shoger picking corn by hand near the end of the era of farming with horses about 1930 just off Route 34 west of Oswego. (Little White School Museum collection)

Change and progress had to wait a few years after the fighting ended because there were still major shortages of all kinds of mundane things from tires to farm equipment as industry shifted gears from war production to serving the nation’s civilian customer base.

One of the biggest changes in agriculture was the move from actual flesh-and-blood horse power to mechanical horsepower. The change started in the 1920, and accelerated even during the dark economic times of the Great Depression. By 1930, Kendall County farmers reported on the U.S. Census of Agriculture that just under half the county’s farms boasted some sort of internal combustion machine, from trucks and cars to tractors.

In the 1945 Ag Census, however, nearly all of the county’s 1,145 farms reported having at least one tractor and close to 1,100 of them reported having either a truck, a car, or both.

The author test-drives a new IH Farmall tractor at the Wheatland Plowing Match about 1950.

I got to thinking about that the other day when we were having breakfast with one of my nephews, and he asked about the kinds of work horses my dad favored. By the time I came along, the working horses on our farm were long gone, replaced by a bright orange Allis-Chalmers W-D tractor and an older 1930s model Case tractor.

But when he had farmed with horses, my father favored Percherons. He said he liked them for their intelligence and strength, although he said you always had to be on your toes around them because they were far from the most docile breed.

But while the working horses were gone from the farm—my sisters always managed to talk my dad into keeping at least one riding horse around the place—the evidence of them remained, from the wooden-floored stalls and tack room in the barn with the wooden pegs that once held their complicated harnesses to the odd wooden single or double-tree to the steel driver’s seats remaining on some of the older farm equipment.

The farm equipment itself was in transition during that era. Storing loose hay in the barn’s haymow had given way to having hay crops bailed and then stacking the bales in the mow. But I remember my dad and Frank, our hired man, still used the old hay fork system built into the barn to lift the bales up into the mow for a few years, at least. The forks were huge things designed to grab onto a big bunch of loose hay. They used the old Case tractor to pull the lifting rope that raised the forks up to the track that ran the length of the barn. When the forks reached the track, a lever automatically tripped and the forks with their load of loose hay—or carefully stacked bales—traveled into the barn on the track until it reached the stop, which caused the forks to open up and drop their load. The stop could be adjusted along the track so that the hay could be dropped progressively closer to the giant haymow door in front of the barn.

It was a fascinating process that I could only watch until my latest asthma attack began—I was allergic to just about everything on the farm, from the crops to the livestock.

The author, co-piloting the Matile Farm Case tractor with his father at the controls, about 1949.

Eventually, the hay forks were replaced by a tall portable elevator that was belt-powered from the old Case tractor, something that was a bit more efficient—and faster—than the old method. Hay bales could be pitched onto the elevator, raised up to the haymow opening, and dumped in an endless stream keeping the guys stacking them in the mow moving fast.

We needed that hay because diversified farming was still very much a thing in the early 1950s. My parents’ farm not only grew corn and soybeans, but also plenty of livestock. My dad fed cattle every winter and raised hogs as well. Along with the grain crops, my dad also grew alfalfa and timothy, which was baled for fodder for those feeder cattle. When my sisters prevailed upon him to keep a horse—and later when I was gifted with a particularly mean-spirited Shetland pony—he also raised a few acres of oats for their food.

Farming during that era was a true partnership. My mother didn’t work off the farm—she had way too much to do on it. She raised chickens and traded the eggs as well as the dressed chickens for groceries in town. She also kept a huge garden, and also harvested fruit from our farm’s small orchard, canning cherries, apples, apricots, plums, and peaches.

In fact, we grew a LOT of what we ate on the farm, from that garden produce to the hogs and steers the grown-ups butchered every year. Originally, before I came along, the beef was taken to the Farm Bureau building in Yorkville where it was further cut up, wrapped, and stored in the freezer locker my folks rented. But in 1951 or 1952, my grandparents bought all their kids gigantic International Harvester deepfreezes and after that we kept our own frozen food at home.

We also usually had our own cow, always a Guernsey because my dad thought they produced milk with the most butterfat. The cow had to be milked twice a day in one of the old workhorse stalls in the barn. I remember watching him milking and occasionally giving one of the barn cats a squirt of fresh milk straight from the cow. He was a good shot, and they soon learned that when the cow arrived, a treat for them wasn’t far behind. The milk was run through the milk separator down the basement to separate out most of the cream, which was either sold at the cream station in downtown Yorkville or given to my grandmother, who churned it into butter. What milk we didn’t need for our own consumption either went to my Aunt Bess McMicken for her to make cottage cheese or was fed to the hogs with coarse oat flour mixed in to create “slop.” You’ve heard about slopping the hogs? Well, that’s what THAT was all about.

But the times, they really were a-changin’, as the poet later said. Farmers had already begun to specialize in either grain or livestock farming instead of the diversified farming that had been a feature of American agriculture since the first colonists arrived. It became clear soon enough that farming wasn’t necessarily a small-time thing any more. Where my dad made a fairly decent living off 180 acres, the changes in farming meant more and more land was needed by each farmer. That led to much bigger equipment and much larger farms. But since there’s a finite amount of land there also relatively quickly became many fewer, larger farms, a trend that continues to this day.

Remember those 1,145 Kendall County farms back in 1945? Today there are a little over 300 farms in the county, but they average much, much more in acreage.

During the 1970s, the changeover from diversified to specialized grain or livestock farming culminated. Grain prices soared due to bad weather overseas and a new grain purchasing deal with the old Soviet Union. Government agricultural policy encouraged farmers to assume more and more debt to buy more and more land and the equipment to farm it.

As Earl Butz, Richard Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary urged in 1973, American farmers were supposed to plant “fencerow to fencerow,” and “get big or get out.”

A size comparison: My nephew poses with his classic old Farmall tractor and with one of the kinds of giant machines they use these days that dwarf anything used back in the heyday of diversified farming.

That caused both land values and prices of equipment to spike. And inflation wasn’t just affecting the farm sector, either—it was a nationwide problem. At which point the Federal Reserve System started raising interest rates to unprecedented levels to cool off the economy meaning all those farm loans were suddenly almost exponentially more expensive to service. And then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and President Jimmy Carter instituted a grain embargo in retaliation, choking off one of the farmers’ biggest markets.

The result was a rolling tide of farm bankruptcies that was particularly severe among family farmers. Which led to more consolidation and to ever fewer farmers as farms kept getting bigger. But even so, productivity soared as new crop varieties and steadily bigger farm equipment meant a single farmer could do the work that it took several to do just years before.

And the dominoes just kept falling. Fewer farmers meant thousands of families left already sparsely populated rural areas and that meant whole towns nearly disappearing along with institutions that once held those communities together, from churches and schools to locally-owned stores to civic organizations. The effects have been disastrously cumulative. For instance, largely rural Clinton County, Iowa’s population declined by nearly 19 percent between 1980 and 2020.

Meanwhile, here in Kendall County, Illinois, we’ve been experiencing a veritable population explosion as Chicago metro region growth has moved steadily west along the U.S. Route 34 corridor. During the last 43 years, thousands of acres of prime farmland were lost, not to farm consolidation but to development as we changed from an overwhelmingly rural county to one that is firmly suburban. Between 1980 and 2020, Kendall’s population more than doubled from 37,202 to 131,969, an increase of 254 percent.

Subdivision under construction in Oswego just as the housing bust hit in 2009. In the early 2000’s Kendall County, partly driven by Oswego’s growth, was the fastest growing county in the nation. The pause in construction caused by the lending crisis in 2009 has now largely disappeared and construction in the area is again booming. (Ledger-Sentinel photo by John Etheredge)

That growth has led to a number of challenges, but on the whole they’ve been easier to deal with than experiencing population declines and the severe strain that puts on communities and their institutions. The Biden administration is promising to try to help rural areas deal with the problems the last four decades of cultural and economic changes have created. But rural areas already receive significant federal assistance through a web of financial aid programs, so exactly what else can be done doesn’t seem clear to me. Hopefully, somebody far above my pay grade has some good ideas about what to do.

Time was, most of the nation was rural and much of our national mindset still drifts that way, even though the vast majority of the population no longer maintains any sort of rural lifestyle. And, oddly enough, because so few farmers are needed these days, even most rural residents don’t know much about farming these days.

I’ve always counted myself lucky to be born when I was. I got to experience the era of diversified farming and understand how it worked. I was able to go to a one-room rural school and experience the last vestiges of the kinds of schools that had educated so many Americans starting in colonial times. I saw my mother trade produce for groceries and experienced the monthly visits from the Raleigh man with his fascinating sample case full of ointment, and nostrums and spices. And I was able to enjoy the last of the great era of radio entertainment, listening to the soap operas my mother adored and the westerns my dad favored along with such rural standards as “The National Barn Dance” every Saturday night on WLS out of downtown Chicago and the “Dinner Bell Time” noon farm market reports every day.

Though fondly remembered, it’s an era as far gone as horse-and-buggy days.

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Those “Amber waves of grain” are mostly a thing of the past in Kendall County

My dad, while watching someone with a lot of energy, would often remark, “He’s really feeling his oats!”

It’s an expression you don’t hear much, if at all, these days, but back when the U.S. was a mainly agricultural nation the phrase really meant something, especially to those who had lived during the era when horses provided much of the motive power that grew the nation.

Granted, horses can eat hay and graze on pasture grass, but it turned out that oats are a sort of superfood for horses.

As Horse Canada magazine explained, “Of all the cereal grains (e.g. corn, barley, wheat, etc.) oats have the most appropriate nutritional profile for horses. They are an excellent source of calories, and have a better protein and amino acid profile than many other grains. They are higher in fat and fibre (thanks to the hull) and are, therefore, lower in non-structural carbohydrates (NSC) than most other grains. They are well digested within the horse’s small intestine, even with little processing (as long a horse has good teeth!) and, therefore, pose a lower risk of sugars reaching the large intestine and contributing to colic or laminitis. Also, because of their lower NSC content, they are not considered a ‘hot’ feed.”

When Katharine Lee Bates wrote about “amber waves of grain” in “America the Beautiful,” she was talking about cereal grain fields like this stand of oats.

These days, horses, especially on farms, have been mostly relegated to the status of expensive hobbies and oats are considered for their value as health food. What were the mechanics of that change over time?

By now, even casual readers of this blog have realized I have a keen interest in how farming has evolved during the past couple centuries or so. And, especially as this time of year rolls around, few things illustrate the profound changes in farming and farm culture than virtual disappearance of small grains in the local agriculture cycle.

Small grains are ancient in origin and were (and in some areas of the world still are) vital parts of the farming process. But not here, and not now.

Defined as cereal grains—wheat, oats, rye, and barley—small grains are, like their cousin, corn, the seeds of genetically modified grasses that humans have relied upon for food for thousands of years. Some, like oats and wheat, still somewhat resemble their ancient genetic ancestors. Other grains, like corn, no more resemble their most ancient ancestor than a Chihuahua resembles a timber wolf.

You can still drive around the northern Illinois countryside this time of year and see a few small fields of small grains turning a beautiful golden color in the summer sun. But today’s occasional fields of oats and even more rare stands of wheat are pale shadows of what farmers planted and grew here a century and more ago.

A century ago, the annual harvest of cereal grains like oats, wheat, barley, and rye were just getting a good start this time of year. Above, the East Oswego Threshing Ring’s steam engine and threshing machine works on the 1911 harvest in eastern Oswego Township. From the Aug. 3, 1910 Kendall County Record: “Farmers are very busy threshing wheat and oats.” (Little White School Museum collection)

These days, instead of those once extensive fields of ripening small grains, you’ll mostly see extensive fields of tall corn swaying in summer prairie breeze, interspersed with huge fields of soybeans, a crop that was as rare here in the 1920s as wheat is today.

Why the change, why the evolution? Because times change as does the use to which crops are put. Back in the early 1800s when pioneer farm families settled Kendall County, small grains were absolutely necessary for survival. Wheat was harvested and ground into flour either on the farm or at one of the new gristmills that were rapidly popping up along every county stream whose bed had enough fall to power a waterwheel.

Oats, on the other hand, were the fuel that powered the horses and mules that were the backbone of energy on the farm and in the transportation industry of the era. Granted, oats, too, could be ground into flour or they could be otherwise processed for use as oatmeal and for other human foods, but their primary use was to feed the millions of horses the nation relied on for everything from pulling stagecoaches to delivering beer.

A stand of ripe oats in the field. The grain once fueled the horses that everyone from farmers to handsome cab drivers relied on.

Barley and rye were also used for human consumption by being ground into flour, but they were also popular grains for processing into the beer and whiskey so beloved by so many in that era when drinking water was mistrusted, often for good reason. The germ theory of disease was still considered a radical hypothesis, so wells and outhouses were often adjacent leading to outbreaks of typhoid fever and other waterborne illnesses from which even the wealthy were not immune. In 1861, Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, died of complications of typhoid fever contracted in their London palace, probably from tainted water.

But back to farming. It didn’t take too long after settlement for farmers to realize northern Illinois really wasn’t good wheat country. Wheat likes warm, relatively dry growing conditions, and while we all know Illinois does not lack for summer heat, dry conditions (except during drought years) are not what you find around these humid parts.

As the frontier kept moving ever farther west, those ideal wheat conditions were found west of the tallgrass prairies out on the Great Plains in a huge swath from Texas north to the Dakotas. Improved transportation systems added to the climate soon meant that bread could be baked in regional cities and shipped to small farming towns cheaper than rural folks could produce it on their own.

Horses and mules were raised in the barns at the old Judson Farm on South Madison Street at Wilson Place, on the south end of Oswego. (Little White School Museum collection)

But that didn’t apply to oats. In 1912, which was close to the high-water mark for oat production, Kendall County farmers harvested 53,000 acres of the grain, producing well over 2.5 million bushels to feed their own horses and mules, but mostly for market. But by 2007, so few acres of oats were harvested in Kendall County that the U.S. Department of Agriculture didn’t even report them.

Why so many bushels of oats then and so few later on? When oat production was at its height, farmers relied on horses to plant and harvest crops and then haul them to market. Today, farmers use gasoline and diesel oil to fuel those activities, which have become entirely mechanized. And in towns and cities, where horses once hauled everything from streetcar passengers to mail delivery buggies to the milkman’s delivery wagon, hydrocarbon-fueled machines have replaced the millions of horses that once did those tasks.

By 1900, the nation’s total horse population reached an estimated 24.1 million, with just under three million being kept in cities. In cities with more than 100,000 population there was roughly one horse for every 15 people, varying from one horse for every 7.4 people in Kansas City to one for every 26.4 in New York City. And those horses required millions of bushels of oats for food. The nation’s horse population peaked about 1915, and from then on thanks to the advent of dependable, economical automobiles, the horse population declined by about a half a million animals a year. Along with that decline, the need for oats similarly decreased.

By 1912, the transition from horse powered vehicles to vehicles with horsepower was well underway as this winter scene on Washington Street in downtown Oswego suggests. (Little White School Museum collection)

Not that folks back then were sad to see horses go, of course. In Chicago in 1900, the city’s 82,000 horses deposited between 1.2 and 2.4 million pounds of manure and 20,500 gallons of urine in stables and on city streets every day. In addition, one contemporary expert estimated in 1900 that three billion flies—each a tiny airborne disease factory—hatched in horse manure every day in U.S. cities. It was little wonder automobiles and trucks were welcomed by public health experts of the era.

So the realization that wheat grew better farther west, the disappearance of the horse, and the evolution of Midwestern farming to specialization in either raising grain or livestock led to the annual harvest of small grains and all that it meant to our farmer forebears, both socially and economically. But gradually it became mostly a thing of the past here in the Fox Valley. The change accelerated as the nation transitioned from a largely rural to an overwhelmingly urbanized nation.

And so today, you can drive around Kendall County and still see small stands of cereal grains here and there. But the “amber waves of grain” that once carpeted our landscape have been almost entirely replaced by corn and soybeans–and subdivisions. I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad, but it’s certainly a big change.

Get a horse? Not so fast, buddy…

Right up until hundreds of thousands of Henry Ford’s cars began to replace them in wholesale lots, horses made the United States hum. They powered farm machinery and they hauled freight inside and outside metropolitan areas. And they caused a variety of public health problems, many of them serious.

In the pre-auto era, horses provided the power to run modern urban areas. As this photo of Sydney, Australia’s famed Pyrmont Bridge suggests, city horse traffic was often very heavy. (Courtesy Low-tech Magazine)

According to one estimate, each urban horse consumed roughly 1.4 tons of oats and 2.4 tons of hay and other fodder per year. A contemporary British farmer reported that he figured each horse consumed the product of five acres of land, an area that could have fed six to eight people. Some 15 million acres were needed to feed just the urban horse population at its zenith, an area about the size of West Virginia. Directly or indirectly, feeding horses meant clearing new land of its natural animal life and vegetation, cultivating it, developing and growing new strains of crops, and sometimes diverting water to irrigate it, with considerable negative effects on the natural ecosystem.

In 1870, the U.S. Census Bureau counted 8.7 million horses in the U.S., with more than 1.5 million categorized as “not on farms.” By 1900, the total horse population had grown to 24.1 million with slightly less than three million in cities. In cities with populations of more than 100,000, there was roughly one horse for every 15 people, although that varied. In Kansas City, for instance, there was one horse for every 7.4 people while in New York City the ratio was one horse for very 26.4 people.

The hay press, often housed in its own special barn, compressed hay into bales for easier storage and shipping. This stationary hay press is in the collections of the Green Gables Heritage Place on Prince Edward Island, Canada. (Roger Matile photo)

The rural hinterland near urban centers were tapped to supply staggering amounts of hay and other fodder. In the East, the New England states became a large hay-growing area to supply the needs of New York, Boston, and the other cities of the region. In other parts of the country, every agricultural area close to urban centers produced hay to help feed the growing numbers of urban horses.

The demand not only increased the acreage under cultivation for hay, but also led to the introduction of new hay crops including bluegrass, orchard grass, alfalfa, timothy, and white and red clover.

The problem with supplying hay to urban centers from their agricultural hinterlands was transporting the bulky product. As early as 1836 the hay press had been invented to press hay into bales for easier handling, storage, and transport. By the late 19th Century every small town had its hay press barn to house the press, which was generally powered by horses with the hay brought to town for pressing by area farmers.

Around these parts, the first hay press barn started operations on space rented on a local farm in September 1871. Others soon followed. And the customers were far from local, or even engaged in the Chicago market. As the Kendall County Record’s Oswego correspondent noted on March 7, 1872:

This is getting to be a big hay market; about 10 [rail] cars were left here on Saturday to be loaded for the Boston trade and about half of them have now gone forward.

In 1899, one expert estimated that nearly a third of the hay produced in rural areas was being shipped out of its county of origin. That year, Chicago imported nearly 198,000 tons of hay.

Before the advent of trolley and cable car systems, cities relied on huge numbers of horses to power their street car systems. (Courtesy of the International Museum of the Horse)

The need for urban forage also had important effects on which crops farmers chose to grow. In 1879, roughly 11 percent of the nation’s farmland was sown into hay crops. By 1889, it had jumped to nearly 15 percent.

Oats were the other staple crop of the horse trade. High in fiber and protein, oats were uniquely suited to the horse’s digestive system. The burgeoning oat markets for the horse trade led to a variety of innovations, including spurring the invention of the grain elevator and making Chicago a key grain shipping and marketing center.

Of course, what goes in must come out, and that’s where the era’s public health concerns began. Experts of the day estimated each horse produced between 15 and 30 pounds of manure per day. For Chicago, which had a horse population of 82,000 in 1900 (about when the city’s equine population reached its peak), that meant between 1.2 and 2.4 million pounds of manure were deposited on city streets and alleys and in city stables every day. Each horse also produced about a quart of urine daily, which in Chicago added up to around 20,500 gallons per day.

Wet weather turned unpaved city streets into swamps and rivers of muck, but dry weather brought little improvement as manure and urine-soaked mud dried. Traffic turned it into to fine dust—even in paved areas—which was then whipped up by the wind, choking pedestrians, coating buildings, and sifting into homes, businesses, and schools.

Although hay and oat shipments to the city were reciprocated with manure hauled back to the country for fertilizer, as the 19th Century wore on the surge in the number of urban horses caused the fertilizer market to crash. While early in the century farmers were happy to pay for the manure, by the end of the 1800s stable owners had to pay to have it carted off. As a result of this glut, which became particularly severe in the summer when farmers couldn’t spread the manure on their crops, which were already growing, vacant lots in cities across America were piled high with the stuff. In New York these piles sometimes towered 40 to 60 feet high.

Horses not only deposited impressive quantities of manure and urine onto city streets, but quite often their own bodies were left to rot where the unfortunate animals fell. (Courtesy Ephemeral New York blog)

And as if all that wasn’t bad enough, one contemporary expert estimated that in 1900 three billion flies—each a small mobile disease factory—hatched in horse manure every day in U.S. cities.

And it’s also part of the history of that day and age, and important to remember, that dead horses often littered city streets, creating yet more disease vectors.

In 1915, the horse population in America peaked at more than 21 million animals. But thanks to the introduction of the auto, they were replaced at the rate of about a half-million a year through the 1920s. By 1960, only about three million horses remained in the U.S. and the era of urban horsepower was long past.

During the time that literal horsepower was replaced with mechanical horsepower in the nation’s economy, millions of tons of horse manure, thousands of gallons of horse urine, and billions of flies were gradually eliminated from U.S. cities. When you think about it, the problems we face today caused by the glut of autos on our streets seem to pale in comparison to the conditions our great-grandparents took for granted.