Early settlers grew bumper wheat crops on southern Minnesota’s fertile prairies, land that today supplies produce for a thriving 270-million-dollar-a-year canning industry. Sweet corn canneries opened in Austin and Mankato in the early 1880s, followed soon after by similar factories in Faribault, Owatonna, and LeSueur. Soon Minnesota’s canners were experimenting with new technologies and new products, and in 1903 the automated Big Stone Cannery Company founded by F.W. Douthitt changed the industry nationwide. Douthitt’s plant in Ortonville had a conveyor system, mechanical corn husking machines, and a power driven cutter that produced the first whole kernel canned corn. The Green Giant Company, also founded in 1903 as the Minnesota Valley Canning Company, introduced golden cream-style corn in 1924 and the first vacuum packed corn in 1929. Corn is still the major canning crop in Minnesota. The state’s more than thirty plants also freeze and can peas, beans, carrots, tomatoes, pork, beef, chicken products, and such unusual items as rutabagas. Mankato was the site of the nation’s first carp cannery in 1946.