On This Date: Milestones That Shaped American Agriculture

September 23 has quietly marked some of the most consequential turning points in U.S. agriculture—moments that opened new frontiers, redirected policy and markets, and revealed the human stakes of how land and food systems are organized. From the return of the nation’s most famous exploration party to an unexpected burst of Cold War “corn diplomacy,” the date has repeatedly intersected with the country’s farming story.

1806: Lewis and Clark return to St. Louis, closing a chapter that opened the West to farming

On September 23, 1806, the Corps of Discovery—led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark—ended their 28-month expedition and arrived back in St. Louis. The immediate headlines were about geographic discovery and a water route west; the long-term agricultural consequences were just as profound. Their journals and specimens documented soils, climate bands, and plant communities across the Missouri and Columbia basins, offering early insight into what might be farmed where as U.S. settlement crept beyond the Mississippi.

Along their route, they recorded Indigenous agricultural practices—from Mandan and Hidatsa corn, beans, and squash rotations along the Missouri to the use of camas and other native crops in the Northwest. They observed floodplain fertility, prairie sod, and drought risk in ways that later boosters, railroad companies, and homesteaders would translate—sometimes imperfectly—into settlement plans. The expedition did not invent western agriculture, but it furnished a map, a natural history, and a powerful national imagination that, within decades, helped turn portions of the Plains and Northwest into grain, cattle, and fruit powerhouses. Today marks 219 years since that pivotal homecoming.

1862: The Battle of Wood Lake ends major fighting in the U.S.–Dakota War, reshaping Minnesota’s farm future

September 23, 1862, brought the Battle of Wood Lake in southwestern Minnesota, the final significant engagement of the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862. The conflict had erupted weeks earlier amid long-simmering treaty violations, delayed annuity payments, and widespread hunger. At Wood Lake, state volunteers under Henry Sibley defeated Dakota forces near the Upper Sioux Agency, effectively ending organized hostilities. In the days that followed, hundreds of Dakota people surrendered at Camp Release.

The immediate aftermath—summary trials, mass executions later that year, and federal acts expelling Dakota people from Minnesota—transformed who held the land and to what uses it was put. Homesteaders soon increased their claims across some of the state’s most productive prairie soils. Grain and livestock systems accelerated, while Indigenous communities endured dispossession and displacement with impacts that echo today. The farms and towns that later blossomed on that ground came at a profound human cost. The agricultural landscape of Minnesota as we know it cannot be told without this date—163 years ago—at its center.

1959: Khrushchev walks an Iowa cornfield and kick-starts “corn diplomacy”

On September 23, 1959, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the Coon Rapids, Iowa, farm of Roswell and Elizabeth Garst—an unlikely Cold War summit meeting staged among hybrid corn plots, feed bunks, and upright silos. Garst, an evangelist for modern seed, fertilizer, and feeding practices, had traveled to the Soviet Union earlier in the decade; now the Soviet leader came to see American yields and machinery up close.

The visit was more than a curiosity. Khrushchev had wagered that corn could boost Soviet livestock output. On that fall day, he peppered Garst and neighbors with questions about acres, harvest moisture, ensiling, and feed conversion. The scene yielded iconic images and a vocabulary of “corn diplomacy” that outlived the moment itself. While the Soviet corn campaign later ran into climate and management limits, the exchange helped normalize agricultural trade and technical dialogue between geopolitical rivals. In the years that followed, cross-border seed trials, equipment sales, and, by the early 1970s, large U.S. grain shipments to the USSR redefined global markets. Sixty-six years later, the Garst farm visit remains one of the clearest examples of agriculture as a bridge in tense times.

1873: A financial panic freezes credit—farmers feel the squeeze

As September 23, 1873, dawned, the New York Stock Exchange remained shuttered in the midst of the Panic of 1873, a closure that stretched for days. The credit shock that began with railroad overreach and banking failures rippled rapidly into the countryside. Equipment purchases were delayed, crop prices began their long slide, and debt burdens hardened for farm families who had expanded under easy money and optimistic rail access.

The agricultural fallout helped fuel the Granger movement’s push for regulation of rail rates and grain storage, culminating in landmark legal battles later in the decade. While no single farm policy was decided that day, the panic week—this day included—exposed the vulnerability of producers to distant financial forces, a theme that has resurfaced in every farm downturn since.

The season itself: Equinox timing and the rhythm of harvest

Late September sits at the hinge of the growing season across much of the United States. With the autumnal equinox typically arriving around September 22–23, daylight declines sharpen crop maturation. Historically, this period has been prime time for corn silage chopping in the Upper Midwest, early soybean cutting in parts of the South, and the first apple and grape crushes from New York to Washington. Cooperative elevators, county agents, and farm families have long used this window to tee up storage, transportation, and labor for the sprint that defines harvest. It is no coincidence that many of the nation’s farm crises and breakthroughs—from price shocks to storage innovations—become most visible when the grain starts to move.

Why these September 23 moments still matter

• Mapping and imagination: The Corps of Discovery stitched a natural resource and climate sketch that still informs where we plant, graze, and irrigate.
• Justice and land: Wood Lake’s legacy is a reminder that agricultural prosperity has often been built on contested ground—and that land policy decisions reverberate for generations.
• Trade and technology: An Iowa farm visit helped recast agricultural know-how as diplomatic currency, foreshadowing an era when corn, soybeans, and meat became tools of foreign policy as much as commodities.
• Markets and risk: The 1873 panic underscored that farm economics are inseparable from broader financial systems, an enduring lesson for today’s debates about credit access, insurance, and price discovery.

Across two centuries, September 23 has been a prism for the forces that keep reshaping American agriculture—science and curiosity, conflict and consequence, innovation and exchange, and the stubborn realities of markets and weather. The date’s through line is clarity: who owns land, how knowledge spreads, and where risk lives in the farm economy. As harvest ramps up again this week, those questions are as relevant as the day Lewis and Clark stepped ashore in St. Louis, the day smoke drifted over a Minnesota prairie, and the day a Soviet premier asked an Iowa seed man how many bushels per acre he was getting.