About Iowa

Iowa takes its name from the Ioway people, a Siouan-speaking nation who lived in the region when French explorers arrived. The word "Ioway" is believed to derive from a Dakota Sioux word meaning "the sleepy ones" or possibly from an Algonquian word meaning "beautiful land." French traders recorded the name of the people and the river associated with them, and the name passed into English as "Iowa." When the Iowa Territory was organized in 1838, the name was applied to the new territory, and Iowa became a state in 1846. The state's name is one of a large group derived from the indigenous peoples who inhabited the Great Plains and Midwest before European settlement.

Iowa sits in the middle of America, geographically, agriculturally, and politically. Bounded by two of the country's great rivers, the Mississippi to the east and the Missouri to the west, the state is a nearly perfectly flat prairie of extraordinary fertility. Iowa has some of the richest topsoil on Earth, a legacy of glaciation that left behind deposits of loam and silt up to 200 feet deep in some places.

That soil has made Iowa a food production machine unlike any other state its size. Iowa produces more hogs, more eggs, more corn, and more soybeans than almost anywhere else in the country. Its agricultural output feeds hundreds of millions of people, directly through food products and indirectly through animal feed, and fuels the nation through its ethanol plants.

Iowa is also reshaping itself for the 21st century. Its wind energy transition has been among the fastest and most dramatic of any state. Des Moines has emerged as a genuinely livable, growing city. And the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in Iowa City has produced more Pulitzer Prize winners than almost any institution in the country. Iowa quietly exceeds expectations.