Ranching and Agriculture on the Frontier essays

Ranching and Agriculture on the Frontier essays Ranching and Agriculture on the Great Plains During the frontier days on the Great Plains there wee two dominant ways of life. Those ways of life were ranching and farming. Most people tend to believe that farming was a much better way of life, mostly due to ties of family and community life. These ways of life were in ways similar but also different in many aspects. Cattle ranching was a way of life that took a lot of land to sustain a number of cattle. This land was used fairly lightly and used creek beds as they were, which is a process called extensive farming. It took about ten to fifteen acres for every cow/calf unit that a rancher owned, which meant the more land that a person controlled the more cattle they could raise. The vast amounts of land controlled by ranchers led to the isolation of the families that ran them. Some ranches were hundreds of miles from the next place of settlement. Upper class ranchers were able to leave the ranch in the winter, but lower and middle class ranchers had to live there year round. This meant that kids had to be home-schooled. This led to a lot of the families not being able to get out and see anything other than their families and anyone else that happened to live on the ranch. Agriculture on the Great Plains was a very intense form of farming, this meant that farmers used smaller amounts of land heavily. Farmers also had to reroute the paths of creeks to irrigate their crops because of the semi-arid conditions. Farming was more of a family based operation in that as soon as children were old enough to help they did. Everyone that was able to help on the farm did. Farming also led to the development of towns because farmers needed a place to go and sell their crops that they had grown. Farming on the Great Plains was tough, considering the semi-arid climate, wind, and the light soil composition. These conditions led the Great Plains to get the nickname Next Ye...