Why Farm?
Sep 2nd, 2018 by John Houghton
For the Potawatomi and the French settlers, farming was a way of providing food for the farmers and their families, with little or no sale or trading to others: “subsistence agriculture,” in technical terms. Because of the relatively poor hilly soil of southern Indiana, the early Anglo-American settlers there, who came mostly from similar areas of the upland South, worked on the same system. Settlers of northern Indiana, however, who came mostly from New England and Europe, intended from the beginning to practice “commercial agriculture”: they would grow enough crops to feed their families and have a surplus to export to other parts of the country.
