Ranching

From Wikinfo

Ranching is raising cattle in large quantities as a commercial activity or lifestyle, although one might also speak of sheep ranching or a hog ranching or even an elk ranch. It is a usage of the Western United States, Canada and Latin America.

Historically, there was a period on the Frontier after the removal of the buffalo and the Native American and before the coming of the homesteaders when ranching was the dominant activity. The public lands on the Great Plains were open range and anyone could turn cattle loose on them. Barbed wire, invented in 1869, was gradually employed to fence off privately owned land especially by homesteaders and ranching became limited to lands of little use for farming, rangeland.

In modern times in the United States with the concentration of wealth into the hands of the upper class a segment of ranching has become the maintenance of the country estate of wealthy owners who, while they may continue to raise cattle, use the ranch as a recreational resources and seasonal residence [1]. The buying of working ranches and selling them to upscale recreational owners has become a viable business [2] This is not really new; even in frontier days wealthy landowners, often British, maintained what amounted to country estates.

A ranch is differentiated from a farm by its size as well as the type of cattle raising conducted and land utilized. A ranch must be of some size, 1000 acres or more, and raise cattle by grazing them upon rangeland, not cultivated pasture, although extensive irrigated pasture used for grazing or hay may be part of a ranch.

Ranching is part of the iconography of Western Film.

Further Reading

• Breaking Clean, Judy Blunt, Knopf, 2002, hardcover, ISBN 0375401318
• This was Cattle Ranching: Yesterday and Today, Virginia Paul, Superior Publishing Company, Seattle, Washington, 1973
• Heart-Diamond Kathy L. Greenwood, University of North Texas Press, 1989, hardback, ISBN 0-929398-08-4

References

• Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Ranching" http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranching July 24, 2003