Ranching and Agriculture on the Frontier
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
Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages, but I believe that overall farming is the better way of life to live on the Great Plains. Ranching, however, was a better use of land on the Great Plains. It made it easier to get to towns and get supplies and see other people. 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. Farming was much more suitable for family and community life, because it wasn't as far away from other people and towns as ranches were. Farming on the Great Plains was tough, considering the semi-arid climate, wind, and the light soil composition. This allowed for a family to farm and not be completely isolated from other people. The extensive farming method better suited the dry and windy conditions. Grace Snyder's family was part of the first Great Plains farming frontier, and they put up with many of these problems on a daily basis. Farmers also had to reroute the paths of creeks to irrigate their crops because of the semi-arid conditions. Paula Nelson also tells the real life story of life on the second generation Great Plains agricultural frontier. Everyone that was able to help on the farm did. Many people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed that farming was a better way of life on the Great Plains.
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