Award-winning Prairie Plates at Rosewild, a white paper on risk and resilience in America’s food system, and what Fargo’s emerald ash borer discovery means statewide.

While many immigrants settled in the East, the Homestead Act enticed a large percentage to the Great Plains, an unfamiliar land that had until then been under tribal control. The land they were able to claim was many times larger than the small farms they had in their home countries. Immigrants were crucial to the settlement of the Great Plains in general, and North Dakota in particular. In 1870, thirty-four percent of the settlers in Dakota Territory were foreign-born. By 1915, nearly eighty percent of North Dakotans were either immigrants or the children of immigrants.