Ecological Frontiers on the Grasslands of Kansas: Changes in Farm Scale and Crop Diversity
利用堪萨斯州25个乡镇1875-1940年的农场数据，探究农场规模扩大与作物多样性之间的关系，发现早期平原农场并非单一种植的推动者，而是随着世代更替变得更加多样化。
Farms stood at an ecological frontier in the 1930s. With new and better agricultural machinery, more farms than ever before made the leap to thousand acre enterprises. But did they abandon mixed husbandry in the process? This article explores the origins of the modern relationship between scale and diversity using a new sample of Kansas farms. In 25 townships across the state, between 1875 and 1940, the evidence demonstrates that relatively few plains farms were agents of early monoculture. Rather than a process driven by single-crop farming, settlement was shaped by farms that grew more diverse with each generation.