Reddit reviews Making the Corn Belt: A Geographical History of Middle-Western Agriculture (Midwestern History &)

There's a good book by John Hudson on the topic, called Making the Corn Belt.. There he talks about how older societies used it, and the steady growth of corn as feed to corn as a commodity produced for mass market consumption (which started in earnest around the mid-19th century in Illinois). It wasn't really until the 19-teens that monocropping corn became the truly dominant form of agriculture in the Corn Belt, at least per his book.