Agricultural Frontiers

we had a hundred years of farming back east for the plains were plowed as each Sun grew to manhood he took his eggs and set about to clear new land to take the land from trees and give it to the plow he planted wheat and when it grew he used his scythe the same one that he used to harvest hay but with the cradle on most of the work was done by hand his hands and those of his wife but there was a sharing of the tasks by a man and his wife a pattern had already started the pattern of one town just big enough to be run by one Pam one farm family living on one farm is as old as American farming a plantation farming with its many families living on a single huge farm had established a pattern of his own in the agriculture of early America which would win out on the Prairie frontier would we have single farms or would we have ranches or plantations for the most part the back east farmer and the immigrants from North and Central Europe but settle on the plains they were disposed to farm as they had before but there were problems and setbacks to face them in a frontier land special ploughs with extra oxen pulling them were needed to get the breaking done but the second year with an iron plough that had scoured in the soil back east that was something else would the pioneer try grazing and ranching but the new steel plow was to come along just in time he broke the Prairie sod and he planted wheat not corn not on a Frontierland the law was that the open range if you want to raise crops it's up to you to build a fence to keep your neighbors stock out in a land of few trees there wasn't a chance for a rail fence and what could you expect from a smooth wire fence grazing might be better the going was tough - the law was changed after that it was up to the man who owned the stock to herd them or to tie them out until the real answer came he tried some corn the results were promising he tried a larger patch with most of the rainfall coming during the growing season the results were good so he cross-hatched his field with a marker raised his corn in hills and grew a bumper crop this soil was good for corn he hitched a team onto the planner now and with a lever dropped the corn right on the lines that crust but even then there was a limit to what a man could do that meant there was a limit to the size of his farm and it meant that the companion crops for corn would be those which would distribute the labor would spread the work out over the year oats did that and with the oats a new well-balanced work year developed for the farmer disking sowing harrowing planting cultivating paying harvesting threshing plowing the work had spread out over the year the pattern was good but still there were problems ahead in many years too much the crop was lost by drunk so we said about to improve the drainage while we were at it we drained the sloughs and lowlands too and did you know that we spent more money to drain our farms in Iowa than was spent in billing the Panama Canal 19:15 was a good year for oats all thrashing hands as usual we're trying to guess the bushels per acre by watching how often the bushel counter trip it dumped so often that year that the yield was usually higher than the guests 1921 the counter had slowed down a bit 1925 don't smoke I need 27 rust rust so bad that some farmers were looking for a substitute crop they tried barley that was before the days of velvet beards some were bound to land on unprotected skin and with every move they crawl cut and leave their faint red welt by the end of the day but not much worse than the end of the day on a binder cutting oats a ride and a Red Cloud rust year after year the rust was taking a heavy toll from our crop of oats what would happen to our cropping plan without notes you