Indian Institue of Management 2000 M.B.A CAT - Question Paper

the great grass prairie. The Europeans were puzzled by this new environment. a few even called it the "Great Desert". It seemed
untillable. The earth was often very wet and it was covered with centuries of tangled and matted grasses. With their cast iron plows,
the settlers obtained that the prairie sod could not be cut and the wet earth stuck to their plowshares. Even a team of the best oxen
bogged down after a few years of tugging. The iron plow was a useless tool to farm the prairie soil. The pioneers were stymied for
nearly 2 decades. Their western march was halted and they filled in the eastern regions of the Midwest.
In 1837, a blacksmith in the town of Grand Detour, Illinois, invented a new tool. His name was John Deere and the tool was a plow
made of steel. It was sharp enough to cut through matted grasses and smooth enough to cast off the mud. It was a simple tool, the
"sod buster'" that opened the great prairies to agricultural development.
Sauk County, Wisconsin is the part of that prairie where I have a home. It is named after the Sauk Indians. In 1673, dad
Marquette was the 1st European to lay his eyes upon their land. He obtained a village laid out in regular trends on a plain beside the
Wisconsin River. He called the place Prairie du Sac. The village was surrounded by fields that had given maize, beans and squash
for the Sauk people for generations reaching back into the unrecorded time.
When the European settlers arrived at the Sauk prairie in 1837, the government forced the native Sauk people west of the Mississippi
River. The settlers came with John Deere's new invention and used the tool to open the area to a new type of agriculture. They
ignored the traditional ways of the Sauk Indians and used their sod-busting tool for planting wheat. Initially, the soil was generous
and the farmers thrived. However, every year the soil lost more of its nurturing power. It was only thirty years after the Europeans
arrived with their new technology that the land was depleted. Wheat farming became uneconomic and tens of thousands of farmers
left Wisconsin seeking new land with sod to bust.
It took the Europeans and their new technology just 1 generation to make their homeland into a desert. The Sauk Indians who
knew how to sustain themselves on the Sauk prairie land were banished to a different type of desert called a reservation. And they even
forgot about the techniques and tools that had sustained them on the prairie for generations unrecorded. And that is how it was that

Earning:   Approval pending.