Farm in Pennsylvania
Farming, rather obviously, got its start, as we conceive of it, in the East. I suppose a person could argue, and some no doubt would, that this isn't completely true as various native groups farmed all over the region east of the Mississippi and down into Central America. And that would, of course, be true. And it's significant in terms of how the landscape appeared, and even in terms of what was grown, in later times, but for our purposes here, we should really look at European American farming.
For somebody in agriculture in the West, looking at agriculture in the East is really a shock. I've just had the opportunity to do that several times recently, as I flew in and out of Toronto, and got a look at the area from the air, and then I flew the next week to Tampa and had to drive from there to New Port Ritchey. This past week I flew into Baltimore and a friend and I drove up to Carlisle on the state highway, one of the ones that no doubt runs on the 19th Century pike. Very interesting. Following that, I flew to Atlanta and then back over the south and the big grain belts of the nation.
Viewing the farm ground in Maryland and Pennsylvania was both a delight, and a surprise. For one thing, there's a lot of it. Just as Easterners have the erroneous view that the West is empty, Westerners, or at least native Westerners like myself, tend to believe that the East is one big city. It isn't. There's a lot of farm ground there.
However, even though I intellectually know better, it's weird to see it. The farms are, and have always been, so small by our standards out here. Grain farms just east of this region, well in Nebraska and Kansas, are enormous. Ranches are big, as they have to be. These Eastern farms are small and you can almost always see a nearby farm.
But, as the countryside in Pennsylvania and Maryland demonstrates, it's been that way for an extremely long time. Farms that are well over 150 years old are near others that are that age and older. And this should be no surprise, as they were all farmed with horse, mule, or oxen, under less than ideal conditions.
Indeed, the soil appears very rocky in some places and stone walls are everywhere, with stones taken, of course, from the fields. The land had to be first cleared of trees, and the forest continue to wage war against the fields and come back at the drop of a hat.
It was of course this sort of farming environment that the drafters of the Homestead Act were familiar with, and that's why the original homestead was only 40 acres in size. That was extremely unrealistic for this country, where it's always been the case that thousands of acres are needed to run cattle. What a shock it must have been to the first homesteaders.
And it continues to impact us today, as the unrealistically small homestead allotments yielded to the system we have in the West today by default, rather than by design, in spite of the views that anti ranching elements may hold about them. The system works, but it was based on a broken model to start with, and had to be repaired to work.
For somebody in agriculture in the West, looking at agriculture in the East is really a shock. I've just had the opportunity to do that several times recently, as I flew in and out of Toronto, and got a look at the area from the air, and then I flew the next week to Tampa and had to drive from there to New Port Ritchey. This past week I flew into Baltimore and a friend and I drove up to Carlisle on the state highway, one of the ones that no doubt runs on the 19th Century pike. Very interesting. Following that, I flew to Atlanta and then back over the south and the big grain belts of the nation.
Viewing the farm ground in Maryland and Pennsylvania was both a delight, and a surprise. For one thing, there's a lot of it. Just as Easterners have the erroneous view that the West is empty, Westerners, or at least native Westerners like myself, tend to believe that the East is one big city. It isn't. There's a lot of farm ground there.
However, even though I intellectually know better, it's weird to see it. The farms are, and have always been, so small by our standards out here. Grain farms just east of this region, well in Nebraska and Kansas, are enormous. Ranches are big, as they have to be. These Eastern farms are small and you can almost always see a nearby farm.
But, as the countryside in Pennsylvania and Maryland demonstrates, it's been that way for an extremely long time. Farms that are well over 150 years old are near others that are that age and older. And this should be no surprise, as they were all farmed with horse, mule, or oxen, under less than ideal conditions.
Indeed, the soil appears very rocky in some places and stone walls are everywhere, with stones taken, of course, from the fields. The land had to be first cleared of trees, and the forest continue to wage war against the fields and come back at the drop of a hat.
It was of course this sort of farming environment that the drafters of the Homestead Act were familiar with, and that's why the original homestead was only 40 acres in size. That was extremely unrealistic for this country, where it's always been the case that thousands of acres are needed to run cattle. What a shock it must have been to the first homesteaders.
And it continues to impact us today, as the unrealistically small homestead allotments yielded to the system we have in the West today by default, rather than by design, in spite of the views that anti ranching elements may hold about them. The system works, but it was based on a broken model to start with, and had to be repaired to work.
