More generally, the concept of the Corn Belt connotes the area of the Midwest dominated by farming and agriculture, though it stretches down into the South as well reaching into Kentucky.

[9] William Scully (1821-1906), from a wealthy landowning Catholic family in West Tipperary, Ireland, immigrated to Chicago in 1851.

He bought up hundreds of thousands of acres of prime Corn Belt farmland in the Midwest, and rented it to tenants.

[10] On account of new agricultural technology developments between 1860 and 1970, the Corn Belt went from producing mixed crops and livestock into becoming an area focused strictly on wheat-cash planting.

[3] In 1956, former Vice President Henry A. Wallace, a pioneer of hybrid seed, declared that the Corn Belt had developed the "most productive agricultural civilization the world has ever seen".