The US already got there in the 30s. Government subsidies are what disincentivized overproduction and got the US out along with better soil preservation techniq

The US already got there in the 30s. Government subsidies are what disincentivized overproduction and got the US out along with better soil preservation techniques. Modern farms are moving to no-till and cover crop practices to protect the soil. Fertilizer isn't as expensive as you think - ammonia and lime are pretty abundant, coupled with good old manure spreading and crop rotation, you can manage the soil pretty well. The Midwest corn belt is in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. This area largely doesn't need irrigation. That mostly occurs west of the Missouri where wheat is slightly more prevalent due to corn's irrigation needs. Source - I grew up on, and farmed myself on, a Midwest Iowa farm, and worked on the largest real-time data analytics pipeline in the agricultural industry for almost six years, my father still farms, and I ran an agritech startup building an autonomous applicator for 5 years. Our real problems are distribution and storage, exports, chemical runoff, new crop diseases and climate change with more prevalent droughts and floods likely in the future. But we're in no danger of another dust bowl or sudden yield collapse. Yields today are nearly double what they were when I was a kid in the 80s. More farmers need to plant cover crops and no-till and use set-aside land for soil preservation, but the good ones are already doing this, and profiting. Agronomists and university extension offices are educating farmers about this. Agricultural states aren't poor - Indiana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri and Iowa are 19, 20, 21, 22, and 31 in state GDP rankings. My State's median income is $61,000 / year and the average household income is $85,000 / year. The cited documentary and this meta-thread seem to have some biases and/conflate Great Plains states with Midwestern states.