American Agriculture by Mark V. Wetherington

Author:Mark V. Wetherington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2021-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

THE SOUTHERN RANGE

The southern Coastal Plains extended from southeastern Virginia to East Texas and stretched from the fall line to the Low Country. Much of this vast tract was covered by longleaf pine trees and wiregrass, a natural and valuable forage plant for cattle and sheep for most of the year. Over time the livestock herding cultures of Indians and Euro-Americans moved inland. The value of the Coastal Plains range attracted southern small farmers and livestock herders into the Carolinas and Georgia during the colonial and Early National period, a migration stream that would eventually reach Texas where it met an even earlier stream of livestock herding from Mexico. Entire communities of herders in South Carolina’s Low Country, for example, migrated to southern Georgia and northern Florida as rice production in South Carolina’s Low Country expanded. Arriving in the 1810s and 1820s, they found little competition from commercial farmers who specialized in cotton growing on the Black Belt and barrier islands.

West of the Carolina rangelands were forests where population density was low and livestock herding was a major economic pursuit. In the early nineteenth century, it was in this remote region, away from the commercial agricultural worlds of cotton, rice, and sugarcane, that southern livestock expanded westward. The wiregrass range in its entirety covered 92 million acres of forest landscape suitable for woods ranching, most of it still uncleared when the Civil War ended. In addition to the Lower South’s grazing lands, the Mountain South supported a similar herding culture, which included marking and branding cattle and turning it loose for most of the year to forage and fend for themselves. This culture moved westward along the Coastal Plains and across Kentucky and Tennessee occupying lands bypassed by commercial farmers raising cotton, hemp, and tobacco. By the 1820s, Carolina herders were moving into the recently ceded Lower Creek lands in southern Georgia and Alabama while in the Upper South they had reached Missouri’s “Little Dixie.”

Corn was the major food crop of forest ranchers and they used most of it to feed their families. Some choice hogs and cows were penned and fed corn to fatten them up for the family table, but most, including sheep, ranged the woods until springtime grazing on grasses and foraging. In the spring they were rounded up and driven to cow pens, where they were marked and branded. Some livestock was driven to coastal markets such as Savannah and Charleston, where they were consumed locally or exported to the West Indies.

In the Midwest, the southern tradition of open-range herding and grazing met the corn-fed livestock culture of the Upper Midwest. Southern range hogs fed on mast—acorns, nuts, and roots. Called rooters and razorbacks, these hogs were thin and rarely fed corn in the South where crops, not livestock, were fenced to protect them from foraging free-range animals. In northern pork markets corn-fed hog meat was preferred over mast-fed southern hogs because northern tastes found open-range hog meat too dark and soft. Deforestation had a direct impact on mast, forage, and fodder as well as a decline in wood for fencing.

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