By Vinayak Shedekar, PhDWhy do Ohio farmers drain their crop land? In the 1850s, early settlers began digging ditches to drain swamps. Drainage transformed the swamps of northwest Ohio into some of the best farmland in the state. After some major advances in drainage technology during the mid- to late-1900s, most of the drainage materials and technologies remained steady (these included new designs of drainage plows, tile trenching machines, corrugated-wall plastic tubing, and laser-beam