Systematic evaluation of agricultural settlements on the Great Plains, employing census data and socio-ecological metabolism methods drawn from sustainability science and agro-ecology, reveals that farmers, driven by personal ambition and national incentives, not only changed their environment; they also adjusted to it in more ways than previously supposed. The “socio-ecological profiles” used in this analysis of the Great Plains are applicable to any agricultural region where governments collected the requisite census data.

American farmers followed a long-term sequence of clearing land, farming it for several decades, and then abandoning it in favor of new land elsewhere. For 300 years, farmers moved across the continent until they reached the Great Plains, and the end of the frontier, in the 1870s. Fertility and crop yields declined for fifty years by the 1930s, an agricultural crisis was looming. Only the adoption of synthetic fertilizer after World War II allowed farmers to continue annual cropping.