Across two centuries, September 16 has repeatedly marked turning points for U.S. agriculture—moments when land policy, extreme weather, and national mobilization reshaped how and where Americans farm, who does the work, and what it takes to keep food moving from field to table. The date threads together the opening of the Southern Plains to homesteading, a catastrophic hurricane that transformed Florida’s farm country, a peacetime draft that upended labor on the home front, and a modern Gulf Coast landfall that tested the resilience of Southern row-crop systems.

1893: The Cherokee Outlet land run remaps the Southern Plains

At precisely noon on September 16, 1893, an estimated 100,000 people surged into the Cherokee Outlet—an expanse often called the “Cherokee Strip”—in the largest land run in U.S. history. Roughly six million acres in what is now northern Oklahoma were opened to settlement under the Homestead Act, producing an overnight patchwork of 160-acre farm claims and a constellation of new towns, including places like Perry, Enid, Blackwell, and Ponca City.

For agriculture, the rush irrevocably altered the Southern Plains. The Outlet—long used by the Cherokee Nation and, for a time, leased to cattle outfits—was converted rapidly to dryland farming. Wheat and other small grains took hold in a region characterized by variable rainfall, high winds, and thin soils that demand careful stewardship. Within decades, those vulnerabilities were laid bare during the 1930s Dust Bowl, when poor moisture and tillage practices across the plains, including parts of the former Outlet, contributed to devastating erosion. September 16, 1893, thus stands as both a milestone of settlement and an enduring lesson in matching cropping systems to climate and soil.

The land run also underscores the tension between federal land policy and Native sovereignty. The opening followed years of pressure on the Cherokee Nation to sell the Outlet under agreements brokered by federal officials. The agricultural footprint it created remains central to Oklahoma’s economy, while its origins continue to inform discussions about land rights and the long arc of U.S. farm expansion.

1928: A hurricane, a flood, and a farmworker tragedy around Lake Okeechobee

On September 16, 1928, a powerful hurricane made landfall near Florida’s Palm Beach coast and drove a deadly surge across Lake Okeechobee. Earthen levees, only a few feet high, failed as wind piled water to the south, inundating farm communities around Belle Glade, Pahokee, and South Bay. Thousands perished—many of them Black and Caribbean migrant laborers who supplied the backbreaking work that powered South Florida’s sugarcane and winter vegetable industries.

Agriculture bore the immediate brunt: cane fields flattened, winter vegetable plantings ruined before they began, packinghouses and worker housing destroyed. But the storm’s longer legacy was infrastructure. Public outrage over the scale of loss accelerated federal flood-control investments. Within the next decade, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a larger, engineered ring around the lake—what became the Herbert Hoover Dike—expanding and later reinforcing it after subsequent storms. Those works reshaped the Everglades Agricultural Area, stabilizing winter production that now anchors national markets for sugar and fresh vegetables, while also introducing modern debates over water quality and ecosystem health.

Every September, the 1928 disaster is a stark reminder that agricultural progress in hurricane country depends on robust water management, safe housing for farmworkers, and emergency plans that reach the most vulnerable.

1940: The peacetime draft forces a rethinking of the farm labor supply

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act on September 16, 1940—the first peacetime military draft in U.S. history. For agriculture, the timing was pivotal. With the nation rearming and then entering World War II, the draft pulled millions of prime-age men from fields, ranches, and packing sheds.

Producers and policymakers scrambled. Agricultural deferments helped some operations retain essential skilled workers. Mechanization accelerated as farms added tractors and combines and streamlined harvest logistics. New labor channels emerged: the Women’s Land Army and youth programs under the U.S. Crop Corps mobilized domestic workers, while the U.S.-Mexico Bracero agreements beginning in 1942 brought in seasonal agricultural labor. Many of those wartime adaptations—greater mechanization, more sophisticated labor management, and cross-border seasonal work—became durable features of American agriculture. September 16, 1940, thus marks the day U.S. farm labor policy entered the modern era, balancing national defense with food security.

2004: Hurricane Ivan tests the resilience of Gulf Coast crops

Hurricane Ivan came ashore near Gulf Shores, Alabama, on September 16, 2004, after raking the Gulf. The storm arrived in the critical pre-harvest window for the Deep South, and its footprint was agricultural as well as urban.

Cotton across coastal Alabama and the Florida Panhandle lodged and defoliated in the winds, turning promising bolls into hard-to-harvest losses. Peanut fields soaked in driving rain, delaying digging and raising post-harvest quality risks. Pecan orchards shed limbs and nuts just ahead of the fall harvest, and poultry houses, barns, and on-farm power infrastructure took direct hits. Timber—a key rural asset in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia—suffered widespread blowdown. Disaster designations unlocked emergency credit and cost-share programs, but the storm also catalyzed longer-term risk management: more on-farm grain drying capacity, sturdier specialty-crop trellising and windbreaks, stronger structures, and broader adoption of crop insurance tailored to wind and excess moisture risk.

Enduring themes from September 16

• Land, law, and livelihoods are inseparable. The 1893 opening of the Cherokee Outlet quickly created new farm communities while raising unresolved questions about justice and stewardship that echo in today’s land-access debates.
• Water control is both protection and responsibility. The 1928 Okeechobee tragedy drove landmark flood-control works that enabled a winter-vegetable powerhouse—alongside today’s imperative to manage water for people, farms, and ecosystems.
• Labor systems adapt under pressure. The 1940 draft set in motion a lasting transition toward mechanization, organized seasonal labor, and new pathways to maintain production in tight markets.
• Resilience is built between storms. Ivan’s 2004 landfall reinforced the value of diversified rotations, wind-smart farm layouts, robust infrastructure, and financial tools that help producers survive the next shock.

Timeline highlights for September 16

• 1893 — The Cherokee Outlet land run opens millions of acres in present-day Oklahoma to homesteading, expanding dryland grain and livestock production on the Southern Plains.
• 1928 — A catastrophic hurricane strikes South Florida; levee failures around Lake Okeechobee inundate farm towns, killing thousands and reshaping flood-control policy and agricultural development.
• 1940 — The Selective Training and Service Act inaugurates the peacetime draft, triggering agricultural labor shortages and a rapid shift toward mechanization and organized seasonal labor programs.
• 2004 — Hurricane Ivan makes landfall on the central Gulf Coast, damaging cotton, peanuts, pecans, timber, and farm infrastructure, and accelerating resilience investments across the region.

Taken together, the events of September 16 trace the evolving contract between American agriculture and the forces that shape it—policy and markets, storms and soils, people and place. They also offer a blueprint: invest ahead of risk, respect the limits and potential of the land, protect the people who feed the country, and keep adapting as conditions change.