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I was plowing through a 1919 soil survey of St. Louis and St. Louis County, Missouri and was shocked to find that wheat was the leading crop in the area over corn. Today the wheat crop has completely disappeared from the area. Only corn and soybeans are grown now. I've also never seen wheat in Iowa, Missouri, or Illinois. Is wheat grown only in the plains states of Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas? Or are there parts of the Midwest states east of the Great Plains where wheat is still grown?
Wheat is grown in Minnesota, but not on a massive scale. It's mostly corn and soybeans. I usually see it grown in small plots on family farms around here.
I have an organic farm in Illinois. My tenant farmer has begun to include specialty heirloom wheats in his crop rotation. Our most recent wheat crop was emmer, and we had a very good yield. The main issue now is finding elevators and mills that store and process these grains. As consumer demand for more organic, non-gmo specialty grain foods grows, we'll see more midwestern farmers planting more wheat. But right now, I get great premium pricing on my crops!
American agriculture is changing in the 21st century, and I'm proud that my land is part of that change.
In southwestern Ohio, wheat used to be a more important crop (many, many) decades ago I suppose mainly to support the need for flour by local bakeries before industrial, nationally distributing bakeries became dominant.
That said, a tiny handful of family farms do occasionally still plant wheat in their rotation, and I suspect it is more common in Amish areas to supply their own flour needs. Last summer in my driving past countless corn and soybean fields in Butler and Hamilton counties, I encountered a single field of wheat, maybe 20 acres.
My uncle bought some straw that was from a farm a couple counties to the north of there, but he had to ask around to find it. Most of the straw bales you could find at farm stores in the area were probably trucked in from the upper Midwest. So not much in Ohio that I know of, but it is not completely extinct either.
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