Farm size

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.

Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: The Irish in Wyoming. A St. Patrick's Day Observation during National Agriculture Week

 

The Kistler Tent and Awning building in downtown Casper Wyoming (the company still exists, but not in this location).  Note the reference to Sheep Wagon covers, herder's tepees and lambing tents, all things that many an Irish immigrant to Wyoming became familiar with.

I linked this item (which is one of the most popular on the blog noted below) to this site way back when I first wrote it.

Today In Wyoming's History: Sidebar: The Irish in Wyoming: Just recently we posted our "green" edition of this blog with our St. Patrick's Day entry .  Given that, this is a good time ...

I'm sure it's bad form to do that again, but today is St. Patrick's Day and its National Agriculture Week. What do the two have to do with each other?  Well, quite a lot. 

At least as late as the 1990s, agriculture made up the largest sector of the Irish economy. I don't know where it stands today, but Ireland has also undergone a tremendous economic and cultural revolution since that time, not all of which is good by any means.  Perhaps Ireland is sort of a cautionary tale, on some things, today, as well as being an example of a host economic lessons of one kind or another.

Be that as it may, Ireland's history, as anyone who has looked at it well knows, has been far from pacific or bucolic.  The Emerald Isle has a tragic history in the extreme, with its principal exports for many years including its young.  Some of those people include my ancestors, on both sides of my family.  Indeed, my great grandmother came from Ireland at age 3, with her sister who was 19.  They were the only two members of that family that the family could afford to send to the United States.  I don't know what became of the rest of them, save for one brother of hers who joined the English army and made a career out of it.

A common concept of the Irish in America depicts them in the urban setting, that was so common for many of them. And, indeed, on my mother's side that would be accurate, as they went to Montreal.  But another very common path for a very rural people was to try to get some land and farm.

Indeed, the Irish were manic about agriculture and land.  In Ireland, having land was paramount, and most of them didn't have it.  To be able to obtain land was everything to many of them, and in the US they had that chance.  Not just in the U.S., of course.  This was also true of much of the English Empire and it was also true for all of North America.  Mexico, for example, first drew the attention of Irish immigrants at the time of the Mexican War, where the Mexicans picked up on the fact that land could be a powerful inducement to desertion for an oppressed, land starved, Catholic, population.  And it worked in some cases.  Young Irish soldiers in the U.S. Army, crossing into Mexican towns to attend Mass, seeing attractive Mexican young ladies, and being offered free land. . . . that went a long ways towards breaking the bonds of loyalty, in some cases, for some so situated.

Anyhow, the Irish are part of the story of American agriculture in the west for that reason and they're particularly associated with the history of sheep ranching here.  Sheep were an animal that they were already familiar with and they became one of the foundational pegs of Wyoming sheep ranching quite rapidly.  The Irish and sheep were a story in Wyoming well into the 20th Century.

Now, of course, in the somewhat glum thread I've been sewing with here recently, it would be wholly impossible for an immigrant to come over and establish a viable ranching operation in the U.S., let alone become rich doing it as some Irish immigrants did.  It isn't even really possible for the average American to get into it.  That should give us some pause.