Over two thousand years ago, indigenous cultures within the Mississippi Valley began creating magnificent earthworks in the form of conical mounds, effigy works, and ceremonial complexes. Amongst the most well known of these earthworks are the Serpent Mound (Ohio), Cahokia (Illinois), and the Poverty Point complex (Louisiana). All three are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Earthworks, large and small, were ubiquitous in many parts of the Midwest when colonial farmers arrived. At the beginning of the 19th Century, there were 10,000 sites in just Ohio. Today, that number has been reduced to around several scores. Farms have played a transformative role in the destruction, interpretation, and preservation of these sites. As farmers worked their land they inadvertently dug into an archival record of human activity. As such, farms became a place where knowledge was both generated and destroyed. This study provides a historical overview regarding the relationship between these earthworks and the farmers who came to occupy the land containing them. Although agriculture was the most destructive force of these sites, the history is more nuanced than typically accounted for. This presentation looks at multiple aspects of this relationship including (a) experiences and opinions of farmers regarding these sites, their creators, and the artifacts that kept turning up in the fields (b) the logistical hurdles that came with plowing and grazing earthwork sites (c) the legacy of colonial farming communities as it relates to Indigenous Peoples and their creations (d) the complicated relationship between archaeologists and farmers and (e) recent trends regarding preservation and collaboration.