Ep 101 Debra Reid, Agriculture History, and Laura Ingalls Wilder

Debra Reid, Curator of Agriculture and the Environment at The Henry Ford, joins host Sarah Uthoff to talk agriculture. Laura didn't just live in Little Houses, she lived on farms across the Midwest. But while people tend to have one idea about what farms were like in the past, it was really much more complicated. We'll examine how agriculture has helped the country through the fulfillment of the Homestead Act, what Wheat Culture was down to what variety Pa and Almanzo would have grown, and how agriculture changed between the late 19th century and the 1910s and 1920s when the Wilder farm Rocky Ridge was thriving.