The Great Plains of the United States, lying between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, were first used by the open-range cattle industry, the heyday of which lasted from about 1866 to 1886. To improve their lean, lanky longhorn, breeders imported Herefords, Durham Shorthorns, and other fine European cattle. As the range became more and more heavily occupied, and as wheat farmers began to till the soil of the Great Plains, it became necessary to put up fences. This was accomplished with a remarkable invention, barbed wire, a new, cheap, and rapidly erected kind of fencing, used in preference to the post and rail fences or the sod and stone walls that had been common in Europe for centuries.
Grain farmers rapidly followed the ranchers, and farming spread from Oklahoma north into Canada. Because hand labour was scarce, cultivation and harvesting were rapidly mechanized. A combine harvester hauled by a large team of mules was used in California in the late 1880s. Different from the combine harvester used in South Australia, this was a prototype of today's machine. Iron and steel plows were produced in large numbers, and steam traction engines were used as power units for many mechanized operations such as threshing. Though seed was usually drilled, yields were often low because manure was in short supply. Furthermore, with manure scarce, a three-year rotation was practiced to prevent soil depletion: two crop plantings were followed by a fallow year. In the Southern states, export staples were produced in addition to subsistence crops.
America's prodigious new supplies of meat and grain were generally exported from the wide ranges of the Western states to the more populous Eastern states and to Europe, where they lowered prices paid to European farmers but played an important role in feeding populations in industrial centres. Fresh meat and dairy produce from Argentina and Australia were carried thousands of miles in newly developed refrigerator ships.
The huge quantities of inexpensive food produced by the newly settled countries created a difficult problem for the European farmer. The arable and mixed farming common in most European countries simply could not compete. In Great Britain, much cropland was planted with grass, and farmers began to raise pedigree animals and dairy produce. On the Continent, where many farmers occupied peasant holdings, a kind of subsistence farming continued. Denmark and The Netherlands turned to production of dairy produce and high-quality bacon, feeding pigs on waste dairy materials. (G.E.F.)
