Iowa

The most thoroughly agricultural state in the country, and the one that decides who runs for president. Iowa lies between the Mississippi and the Missouri on some of the deepest topsoil in the world, formed under prairie grass over thousands of years, and roughly ninety per cent of its land is farmed - a higher share than any other state. The Black Hawk Purchase of 1832 opened it to settlement, statehood came in 1846, and the grid of the Land Ordinance laid out a landscape of square-mile sections that is still visible from the air. Its early politics were unusually liberal for the frontier: the state supreme court struck down school segregation in 1868 and admitted the first woman to the bar in the country in 1869, and it recognised same-sex marriage by unanimous court decision in 2009. Corn and soybeans dominate, most of the corn going to livestock and ethanol rather than to people. The farm crisis of the 1980s emptied small towns and consolidated holdings. The precinct caucuses, first in the nominating calendar from 1972, gave a state of three million outsized influence until the Democrats demoted them in 2024. Des Moines is the capital. Des Moines is the largest city as well as the capital. The state is bounded by rivers on both its eastern and western sides, unusually. Its name comes from the Ioway people. The Loess Hills along the Missouri are a rare windblown-soil formation. Iowa leads the country in pork and egg production. The Amana Colonies were founded as a communal religious settlement in the 1850s.

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