Assuming infinity, Americans didn’t farm so much as strip-mine the soil, ignoring limits until they hit, in the Great Depression, the final limit. Technology that was introduced, such as the tractor and thresher, only served to spread wasteful practices across even larger areas—“to cut and burn away the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest,” as Turner himself wrote, deforesting the southlands and destroying the Great Plains at ever greater rates while rendering the labor of tenant farmers unneeded.
