Between 1860 and 1900, the number of farms in the Great Plains of the United States tripled. This was due to two crucial factors of the late nineteenth century: the taming of vast, windswept prairies so that the land would yield crops and the transformation of agriculture into big business utilizing mechanization, transportation, and scientific cultivation. How did these improvements change farming in the Plains? Why did farmers move to the Great Plains? What were the hardships and difficulties? Let's examine farming on the Great Plains!
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Jetzt kostenlos anmeldenBetween 1860 and 1900, the number of farms in the Great Plains of the United States tripled. This was due to two crucial factors of the late nineteenth century: the taming of vast, windswept prairies so that the land would yield crops and the transformation of agriculture into big business utilizing mechanization, transportation, and scientific cultivation. How did these improvements change farming in the Plains? Why did farmers move to the Great Plains? What were the hardships and difficulties? Let's examine farming on the Great Plains!
Prairie
A large open area of (grass)land, the term often describes the Great Plains in North America.
Taming the Great Plains into a fertile farming region did not come easily. The climate and landscape of the Plains presented formidable challenges. Furthermore, overcoming these challenges did not guarantee success or even provide security. Agricultural development in the West turned the United States into the world's breadbasket. Still, it also scarred the lives of hundreds of thousands of men and women who made the development possible.
Settlement of the Plains and the West involved the most significant migration in American history. Between 1870 and 1900, more acres were settled and put under cultivation than in the previous 250 years. Males accounted for most migrants to new agricultural areas, outnumbering women by about six to five.
Most migrants came from two places of origin: the eastern states or Europe. Several western states opened migration bureaus in the East and in Europe to lure settlers west. Land-grant railroads were incredibly aggressive, advertising cheap land, arranging credit terms, offering reduced fares, and promising instant success.
Most migrants went west because opportunities there seemed to offer a better life.
Did you know? Between 1870 and 1910, the nation's population rose from 40 million to 92 million, and urban populations swelled by four hundred percent. As a result, demand for farm products multiplied.
With the demand for farm products and the increasing number of settlers moving west there came a need for better farming techniques and technology to increase crop yields and tame the prairie.
Did you know? For centuries the acreage of grain a farmer could produce had been limited by the amount that could be harvested by hand. Before mechanization, a single farmer could harvest about 7.5 acres of wheat. With an automatic binder that cut and tied bundles of grain, that same farmer could cultivate 135 acres.
Despite such developments, life on the plains was much more challenging than advertised by those promoting the move westward. Migrants often encountered scarcities of essentials they had taken for granted back home. Vast tracts of land contained little lumber for housing and fuel. Pioneer families were forced to build houses of sod and burn manure for heat. Eventually, railroads made lumber and coal more available, but both were expensive.
Lumber
Another term for cut wood, usually used as fuel for fires or constructing houses.
Sod
The surface turf of grassland. Early settlers on the Great Plain would use sod to build houses within the landscape as lumber was not available to construct other types of homes.
Mail Order Companies
Most farm families survived by depending on their inner resolve and organizing monthly gatherings of nearby farmsteads. By the early 1900s, external developments brought rural settlers closer contact with modern life. Starting in the 1870s and 1880s, mail-order houses - chiefly Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck - expanded and made the products of the industrial east available to almost everyone.
This included housing and access to commodities such as clothing, cookware, furniture, household appliances, and eventually consistent access to newspapers and other literature.
Other problems were out of the control of the technology of the time that plagued the Great Plains farmer. Let's examine these problems.
Water was as scarce as timber. Few families were lucky or wealthy enough to buy land near a stream that did not dry in the summer or freeze in the winter. Most had to transport water over long distances or try to collect rainwater. Machinery for digging wells was limited until the 1880s; it was costly. Most wells were dug by hand and only to depths of fifty feet.
Did you know? Windmills were another method sometimes constructed to bring water to the surface but they were also expensive to build.
Even more formidable than the terrain of the Great Plains was the climate. The expanse between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains is divided by semi-arid regions from northeastern North Dakota and southwestern Kansas and southward to the Oklahoma panhandle. East of this line, annual rainfall averaged about 28 inches per year, enough for crops. West of this line, life-giving rain was never particular: farmers, heartened by adequate water one year, had dust and broken plows in limestone soil the next.
Arid
Very dry areas with little to no rainfall.
The weather seldom followed predictable patterns in any part of the region. In the summer, weeks of torrid heat and parching winds would suddenly give way to violent storms with flash floods washing away crops and homes. Winter blizzards piled up mountainous snowdrifts that halted all outdoor activities. Severe cold waves and howling winds plunged temperatures below zero.
Spring and fall, supposedly more temperate seasons, brought their challenges. In the spring, melting snow from the mountains swelled streams and flooded fields. In the fall, dry conditions could bring on prairie fires.
Did you know? Even if the weather cooperated, nature could be vengeful. Weather that is good for crops is also suitable for worms and insects. In the 1870s and 1880s, grasshopper plagues ate up entire farms. With only a warning of a buzzing din, a cloud of insects a mile high and wide would smother the land and devour everything in sight: plants, seeds, tree bark, and clothes.
American settlers revolutionized the Great Plains into a productive agricultural region despite these hardships. By the early 1900s, the Great Plains were producing grains for not just the United States but enough to sell to the world and dominate international markets. The list below shows the crops grown in the Great Plains and where they were most prevalent.
Wheat: produced in the Dakotas, Kansas, northern Oklahoma and Texas, eastern Colorado, and southern Nebraska
Corn: grown in Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, and northern Kansas.
Oats: grown in Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and in regions of the Dakotas
Loose Hay: grown in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa.
Settlement into the West and the various technological and scientific advances that made it possible altered American agriculture and forced farmers to adjust to a new age. Their adjustments were neither smooth nor painless. The social and economic problems that accompanied agricultural transformation eventually shaped the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States.
Settlement of the Plains and the West involved the most significant migration in American history. Between 1870 and 1900, more acres were settled and put under cultivation than in the previous 250 years.
Most migrants went west because opportunities there seemed to offer a better life. Between 1870 and 1910, the nation's population rose from 40 million to 92 million, and urban populations swelled by four hundred percent. As a result, demand for farm products multiplied.
Life on the plains was much more challenging than advertised by those promoting the move westward. Migrants often encountered scarcities of essentials they had taken for granted back home. Vast tracts of land contained little lumber for housing and fuel. Pioneer families were forced to build houses of sod and burn manure for heat. Eventually railroads made lumber and coal more available, but both were expensive.
In some regions, yes. In most regions of the Great Plains, the climate allows for enough precipitation to facilitate agriculture.
Attempts at farming began as early as the 1820s, but the agriculture industry in the Great Plains did not begin until after the American Civil War in the late 1860s through the 1890s as technology adapted to the needs of the Plains farmer.
What two factors lead to the expansion of farming on the Great Plains?
Creating agricultural land to yield crops.
Where did most farmers on the Great Plains come from?
Europe.
What influential factor lead to an increase in demand for farm products in the late 1800s?
The rapid population growth between 1870 and 1910 in the United States.
Which of the following was not an innovation that allowed more efficient farming on the Great Plains?
Use of the dry farming technique.
Which of the following was not an innovation that allowed for more effective farming on the Great Plains?
The expansion of the railroad.
What economic innovation allowed families settling in the Great Plains to have a higher standard of Living?
Mail-order companies such as Sears Roebuck.
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