Dryland and Cattle: The Agricultural Foundation of Stark County

Before the oil derricks, before the dinosaur museum, before even the railroad, the economy of what would become Stark County was organized around a simple and brutally exposed fact: this is semiarid grassland averaging roughly fifteen inches of precipitation per year, and most of it falls at the wrong time.

The first large-scale agricultural use was cattle ranching. Open-range outfits trailed Texas longhorns north in the late eighteen seventies and early eighteen eighties, stocking the Dakota grasslands with cattle that could overwinter on the native grasses. Theodore Roosevelt was part of this wave, as were dozens of larger outfits backed by eastern and British investment capital. The terrible winter of eighteen eighty-six to eighteen eighty-seven, which piled blizzard on blizzard from November through March, ended open-range ranching in a single season. Some estimates put cattle losses across the northern plains at sixty to seventy-five percent.

What replaced it was a combination of smaller-scale ranching and dryland farming, the latter pioneered largely by the German-Russian immigrants who understood from their Volga steppe experience how to work marginal dryland. They planted winter wheat, a variety that goes dormant through the cold months and matures early enough in summer to escape the worst of the dry heat. They practiced summer fallowing, leaving fields unplanted every other year to accumulate soil moisture. These were techniques developed on the Eurasian steppe and transplanted to an analogous landscape half a world away.

Stark County today remains one of the leading wheat-producing counties in North Dakota, which is itself consistently the largest wheat-producing state in the United States. The county also runs several hundred thousand beef cattle. The landscape you drive through around Dickinson, a patchwork of stubble fields, windbreaks, and range grass with occasional feedlots visible from the highway, is the direct agricultural legacy of that original German-Russian settlement decision: to bet on dryland wheat and cattle in a country that only barely sustains them.