Learning Iowa: Butter

Yet since no actual cash passed into her hands and because she was laboring within the family unit, the frontierswoman was still not officially considered as gainfully employed. This logic extended to her production of surplus domestic goods such as butter and eggs which were sold outside the home for actual cash. Historian Gilbert Fite maintains that butter was a primary cash product on the farmer's frontier, its income often keeping farms afloat during the rocky years.

Riley, in Frontierswomen: The Iowa Experience. The research she cites to support her own is Fite, The Framers' Frontier, 1865-1900.

An anecdote she recounts involves saving large amounts of butter and selling it all at one major trip to town. This is striking because Iowa had settlement going on while there were already well-established towns in Iowa. But I haven't found any references yet to farmers on the outskirts of towns supporting themselves as market farmers. If this is the case, it might explain the lack of CSAs in Western Iowa now.