The changing culture of ranch life

Agricultural techniques, like all other facets of life, have progressed over time. With cattle and other agrarian businesses, the cultures themselves have changed.

I'm old enough to remember when a large percentage of the labor on our ranch and others was dedicated to subsistence, rather than productivity and profit as it is now. Almost every ranch kept a bunch of chickens for eggs and meat, and most maintained a herd of sheep – selling the wool for profit and using the animals themselves for food. They slaughtered a number of beeves during the course of a year, doing their own butchering and making corn beef from much of the meat.

Everyone butchered a few pigs for pork, lard, sausage, and soap. We had a potato garden and a root cellar on the place, and used both until the mid 1950's. With a wood cook stove and two or three wood fired heating stoves, fuel demanded a couple weeks' labor in the fall and winter. My father talked about churning butter and making cheese. In those days a lot of the rancher's labor went directly to the table.

Those practices, along with many others, have disappeared, and even occasional trips to town are fewer, replaced by Amazon and its “one click buy.”

Electricity and the refrigeration that came with it facilitated domestic life to a large extent. Our father often told the story about his father when the new DELCO generator was installed and the electric lights came on. The old man immediately gathered all the beautiful, expensive, crystal chandeliers in the house and took them into the dump.

On our ranch it was all horses until the mid 40's when they bought the first little tractor. It must have been quite an event, as there are a lot of old photographs of the machine taken the day it was delivered to the ranch.

On the production front, the progression was to larger, more sophisticated and much more expensive machinery. We still have a number of the old 20 horsepower tractors on the place, but they get little use, if any. Now, the tractors are 140 or more hp, and the prices are about $1,000/hp. Pitchforks have been replaced by large round or square balers, so the intense physical suffering has been taken out of the haying and feeding chores.

The one task that has remained roughly the same since the old timers built their first cabin on the property in 1867 is flood irrigating the hay meadows. Many of the ditches were surveyed and dug during that era, and the methods have changed little. The largest improvement that we have is the ATV, which eliminated walking for miles through mosquitoes and muck. It's the most rewarding job I know, but is an acquired art, and can bring a person to tears during dry years when water is scarce.

The women are the ones who truly suffered. My grandmother gave birth to seven boys and one girl - the last born. The girl died as a baby, which must have almost destroyed my grandmother, who had been taking care of my grandfather, his bachelor brother, and the seven male children for many years.

Often pregnant, with no plumbing, no washing machine, much less a clothes dryer, water heated on the wood stove, baking bread, diapers on three or four children, meals for everyone, plus a hired man or two, she put in long and hard days. Then she had to wash the dishes and prep the food for the next day, plus keep the house reasonably clean. The men had their Sundays, but the women had the frustrating task of getting the boys ready for mass, plus all the rest involved getting country ragamuffins ready for the public.

When I was in high school I often spent evenings watching television at our grandparents' house. My grandfather, his brother and one uncle were usually asleep in their chairs, but my grandmother, who was getting old even then, sat on a straight backed chair to watch TV, but always headed for the kitchen to take care of some domestic chore when the commercials came on. None of us ever offered a word of help.

Our father was aware of this disparity in domestic life, and he would say at times, “A man's work is from sun to sun, but a woman's work is never done.” Of course, he offered little help around the house; it wasn't part of the culture.

A history professor told me once that on the plains during the homestead days, wagons would sometimes have go out in the spring to look for some poor woman who had given up and just disappeared into a blizzard. I can understand that.