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Farmers of the Great Plains In the late 1860’s and early 1870’s families began to heavily populate what was known as and is still known as the Great Plains. There were two principal methods to acquiring land. A settler could get land at no cost under one of the federal land laws, or he could purchase it from private or public owners. The second method to acquiring land was by purchase. The federal government had withdrawn large areas from the public domain, thereby denying settlers access to it. This was put under land laws. The high point of every farmer’s year was harvest time. The entire family worked from sun up to sun down picking the crops before they rotted throughout the field. Droughts were a constant threat to the farmers, also known as sodbusters. Water became scarce as wells and springs dried out. The rich prairie soil eventually dried out and turned to dust. As the prairie grass grew drier and drier, lightening or heating fires easily ignited it. Walls of flames jumped from field to field turning the farmers’ hard work to ashes. The farmers periodically would have problems with grasshoppers. The grasshoppers would eat through an entire crop within a matter of hours. Families were eventually forced to burn their fields before the grasshoppers and other insects spread. The main crops for farmers in this time consisted of wheat, corn, alfalfa, potatoes, barley, rye, and corn.
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