1. THE AGRICULTURAL CORE
(Chapter 11)

2. Introduction
• Longitudinal divide in interior plains
– Eastern portion: More rainfall, higher carrying capacity
– Western portion: Dry, dominated by grasslands
• Culturally Agricultural Core a region of
– Farms and factories
– Dispersed rural, white, Protestant population
– Clustered urban black and immigrant population
• “Agricultural Core” an area of cultural intensity—
small town and rural—rather than location

3. Agricultural Core
(page 209)

5. Figure 12-1

6. Overlap with Manufacturing Core
• Food processing
industries in
Manufacturing Core
• Manufacture of farm
equipment
(page 210)

7. North America’s Manufacturing Core
(page 91)

8. • Vegetation
– Eastern Forests
• North: Oak-Hickory
• South: Chesnut-Oak-Y. Poplar
– Western Tall Grass Prairie
• Climate
– Humid Continental
– Importance of location
• Major Microclimatic Variations
– Hazards
• Usual: Tornadoes and Flooding
• Unusual: Earthquakes
Physical Geography

9. Population Composition
• Settled by late 19th
century
– Northwestern Europeans: Germany,
Netherlands, British Isles, and Scandinavia
– Later migrants from southern, eastern Europe
in manufacturing cities
• Rural
– Stability
– Resistant to change
– Isolation from change-producing forces

10. U.S. Route 61:
Blues Highway

11. Migration out of
the South
• Eighty percent of America’s ten million
blacks lived in the South in 1917
• When we entered World War I, Chicago’s
brickyards, meatpacking houses, and steel
mills had attracted European immigrants,
but the war halted this flow
• White factory workers in the U.S. were
going to Europe to fight, leaving a vacuum
just as industrial demand was soaring
• Southern black labor was a solution
• Once under way, the movement out of
the South ebbed only during the 1930s
Depression, with the numbers between
1940 and 1970 exceeding a million people
a decade.
•http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/9904/fngm/index.html

12. • In Mississippi laws imposed fines or jail
on agents—usually blacks—who
encouraged laborers to leave the state
• In 1918 a ticket to Chicago from New
Orleans cost about $20—nearly a month’s
pay on some plantations.
• Many people sold their belongings—often
at a loss—and gradually moved north,
working and saving enough money in one
town to move to the next.
• Sometimes families split up
• From Memphis it’s on to Cairo, Illinois, the
halfway point to Chicago. As Judge Irving
had told me in Tutwiler, Cairo was where
the North began. “They had a black
curtain on the bus—white folks in front,
us in back. They took it down in Cairo
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/northamerica/usa/740073/Going-deep-into-the-blues.html
Link to good article

13. Ghetto
• A ghetto is a section of a city occupied
by a minority group who live there
especially because of social, economic,
or legal pressure. The word was
originally used to refer to the Venetian
Ghetto in Venice, Italy, where Jews were
required to live.
• Ghettos are formed in three ways:
– As ports of entry where minorities, and
especially immigrant minorities,
voluntarily choose to live with their own
kind.
– When the majority uses compulsion --
typically violence, hostility, or legal
barriers -- to force minorities into
particular areas.
– When the majority is willing and able to
pay more than the minority to live with
its own kind.

14. Ghetto
• "Ghetto" is also used figuratively, in a classist manner, to
indicate geographic areas with a concentration of any type of
person
• "Ghetto" is also used in slang as an adjective to describe how
city-like or thug-like something is. It can also be a place where
the housing is cheap and people can barely live off their
paychecks.
• The Irish immigrants of the 19th century were the first ethnic
group to form Urban Areas in America’s cities, followed by
Italians and Poles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• Irish and Eastern European immigrants in the early twentieth
century actually were more segregated than blacks of that era

15. Ghetto
• Because there was no
official housing
segregation against most
European immigrants,
the second or third
generation families are
able to relocate to better
housing in the suburbs
after World War II if
possible Chicago ghetto on the South Side. May 1973

16. Ghetto
• In the United States, between the
abolition of slavery and the
passing of the civil rights laws of
the 1960s, discriminatory mores
(sometimes codified in law, or
through redlining) often forced
urban African Americans to live in
specific neighborhoods, which
became known as "ghettos".
– Redlining is something that
banks do, literally drawing a
red line on a map and
refusing to loan money for
anything beyond it. This
practice kills neighborhoods,
it is illegal, but it still happens
today. It also refers to the
practice of refusing to lend
money to any ethnic minority
beyond the red line.
• Redlining traps people by
not allowing them to move
away and by not allowing
any redevelopment or
improvements to be made
to inner-city “ghettos”.

18. Physical Geography: Climate
• Average precipitation > 75 centimeters (>30
inches), most during growing season (April-
November)
• Limited variability, little risk of drought
• Growing season
– Last killing frost from mid-April (south) to mid-May
(north)
– First killing frost late September
• Continental climate: strong seasonal range

19. Average Annual Temperature Range
(page 212)

20. Physical Geography: Relief
• Gently rolling
– Few areas of flat or hilly terrain
– Suitable for farm machinery
– Good drainage
• Result of glaciation
– Glacial till (scraped from Canadian Shield)
– Terminal moraines (debris at leading edge of glacier)
– Sculpting by meltwater
• Bluegrass Plain (Basin), Kentucky
– Limestone bedrock
– Karst: dissolving of limestone by water action—caves,
sinkholes

21. Physical Geography: Soils
• Alfisols
– Form under moderate moisture
– Usually associated with coniferous or mixed forests
– Thin surface (A) horizon
– B-horizon not heavily leached of minerals
– East of central Iowa (except central Illinois, south-
central Wisconsin)
• Mollisols
– Superbly suited to grain production
– Form under grasses
– High organic content
– Deep with A-horizon 50-150 centimeters (1.5-5 feet)

22. M
M
A2
Agricultural Core Soils
Mollisols
Alfisols

23. Accessibility Network
• Advantages
– European and American settler access
– Shipping farm goods to market
• Pattern of waterways
– Eastern Great Lakes: access through Erie Canal to New
York
– Remainder: funnels into Mississippi River
– Navigable by small boats and barges
• Low relief
• Regular rainfall
• City growth at strategic locations

24. Agricultural Development
Early settlers
• Wheat
– High-value crop with reliable market
– Hard on soils, therefore shifted west with settlement
– Shipping dependent on water transport
– Flour milling at break-in-bulk points (Cincinnati,
Buffalo)
• Meat from domestic livestock
– Hogs and cattle
– Mixed farming: raising grain to feed livestock
– Rise of Cincinnati as “Porkopolis”

25. Agriculture: Corn Belt
• Became feed grain of choice
• Best suited to environmental conditions
– Long hot days and warm nights
– Wears out soil, 3-year rotation as early as 1820
• Corn
• Wheat
• Hay (clover, alfalfa)
• Fallow fourth year if needed
– High yields
– Use of stalks and other waste for feed: fermentation
of silage in silos

26. The Family Farm
• Family farm as part of American (and
Canadian) folklore
– Exaggerated images of farming
– Fit until about World War II
– In swift decline today
• Changes in ownership
– Pressure for greater efficiency
– Necessity for larger operations
– Rental and leasing of additional land

27. Corn for Grain, 2002
(page 216)

28. Hogs and Pigs
(page 384)

29. Agriculture in the Heartland
• Cropping Patterns
–Corn Belt to Soybean Belt
–Kentucky Tobacco
–Specialty Crops
• Michigan Fruitbelt
• Niagra Fruitbelt
• Pork
–Close ties to corn farming
–Enormous hog lots
• Beef Cattle
• Dairy CattleFigure 12-8

30. Historical Cultural
Geography
• Indigenous Population
–Connection to fur trade
• 1780s to 1860s
–Importance of land surveys
–Removal of First Nations
–Impact of Civil War
• 1860s to 1920s
–Rise of mechanized farming,
industrialization and railways
Figure 12-10

31. •1920s to 1970s
–Black migration to the North
–Diversification of agriculture
–Suburbia emerging
into galactic cities
•1970s to Present
–Why the Rust Belt?
–Industrial Diversification
–Restoring the Rust Belt
Contemporary Human
Geography
Figure 12-1

32. The Heartland’s Industry
• Iron and Steel
– Importance of location
• Iron from “The Range”
• Coal from Eastern
Interior
– Boom of 1890s-1920s
– Bust of the 1970s-1990s
– What now?
• Agricultural
Processing
• Consumer Durables
• High Tech
– Localized
• Twin Cities and
Chicago

33. Growth of Railroads, 1850, 1860, 1880
(page 95)

34. Broad Shifts in Economic Activity
• Decline in agricultural and manufacturing
labor force
– Greater efficiency
– Fewer workers needed
• Rise in service industries
– More widespread income distribution
– Workers no longer needed in manufacturing,
agriculture

35. Relocation of Industry
• Population shifts
• Computers and telecommunications
• Competition from foreign manufacturers
• Importance of educated workforce
• Growth of Sunbelt (southeastern and southwestern
U.S., western Canada)
• Industrial inertia still important
• Changes in concentration
– Pre-1920: Atlantic Coast states more heavily
manufacturing
– Post-1920: Growth of interior states at coastal states’
expense

36. Township and Range Survey System
• Metes and bounds (east coast)
– Used visible landscape features, directions,
measurements
– Unsystematic
– Subject to conflict
• Land Ordinance of 1785
– North of Ohio River, west of Pennsylvania
– Used system of east-west base lines and north-south
principal meridians
– Regular, rectangular
– Surveyed before settlement

37. Township and Range Survey System
(page 217)

38. Beyond the Corn Belt
• Dairying
– North of Corn Belt
– Climate too cold for corn maturation
– German, Scandinavian immigrants
– Corn silage (cut before maturity), other grains for
dairy cows
– Surplus milk: Cheese, butter (survive trip to market)
• Fruit belts
– Lake Michigan, Lake Erie shorelines
– Moderating effect of lakes

39. Soybeans
Reasons for increased
production
– Legume (adds nitrogen to
soil)
– Climatic demands few
– Many uses
• Eat directly
• Mill into oil
• Meal low in fat, high in
protein
• High export demand
– Two-year corn-soybean
rotation
– Suitable to large, level fields

40. Soybean Acreage
(page 219)

41. Mechanization and Farm Size
• Farm size
– 1900
• ⅓ 73-202 hectares (180-499 acres)
• ⅓ 40-72 hectares (100-179 acres)
• ⅓ < 40 hectares (100 acres)
– 1964: > 50% larger than 105 hectares (260 acres)
– 1992: > 75% larger than 105 hectares (260 acres)
• Increasing use of machinery
– Rural credit available
– Price supports and cropping controls
– Public services in countryside
– Economies of scale, favoring large and medium-sized farms

42. Changes in Farm Size and Number
(page 220)

43. Conversion to Development
Decline in total amount of land farmed
• Out-migration
• Mortgage foreclosures
• Spreading suburbs
(page 221)

44. The Fragmented Farm
(page 222)
(page 224)

45. Transportation and Settlements
• Early 20th
century
– Paving of rural roads
– Farmers’ acquisition of trucks
– Access to larger, more distant markets, bypassing
small villages
• Non-farming population influx
– Possibility of living in countryside, commuting to city
employment
– Lag in this trend in Agricultural Core
– Decline of very small settlements

46. Focus upon
Central Places
• GATEWAY CITY:
Chicago
• SECONDARY
REGIONALS
– Toronto
– Detroit
– St. Louis
• TERTIARY REGIONALS
– Cleveland-Buffalo Zone
– Cincinnati
– Milwaukee
– Twin Cities
– Kansas City