How many great plains are there

How did it come to be? Why is it different? Geographically, the Great Plains is an immense sweep of country; it reaches from Mexico far north into Canada and spreads out east of the Rocky Mountains like a huge welcome mat. So often maligned as a drab, featureless area, the Great Plains is in fact a land of marked contrasts and limitless variety: canyons carved into solid rock of an arid land by the waters of the Pecos and the Rio Grande; the seemingly endless grainfields of Kansas; the desolation of the Badlands; the beauty of the Black Hills.

Before it was broken by the plow, most of the Great Plains from the Texas panhandle northward was treeless grassland. Before the winter dormant season sets in, the wheat stands several centimeters tall.

Its major growth comes in the spring and early summer, when precipitation is at a maximum and before the onset of the desiccating winds of summer.

It is harvested in late May and June. Today, winter wheat is grown across much of the United States, but its zone of concentration is the southern Plains from northern Texas to southern Nebraska. Spring wheat--grown primarily from central South Dakota northward into Canada--is planted in early spring and harvested in late summer or fall.

It is suited to areas of winters so severe that germinating winter wheat would be killed. Most grasslands wheat is grown using dry farming techniques, without irrigation. The soil is plowed very deeply to break the sod and slow evaporation. Most visually obvious, especially in the northern Plains, is the widespread use of fallowing, where the land is plowed and tilled but not planted for a season to preserve moisture.

Beginning around June 1 with the winter wheat harvest in Texas, custom combining crews gradually follow the harvest northward. Unlike migrant farm laborers harvesting other crops, these people, often in large crews that use many combines and trucks, have traditionally been well-paid agricultural workers. The farms in most of the "Wheat Belt" now exceed hectares, which means that more wheat farmers can now afford their own combines.

Still, probably one-third of all Great Plains wheat is harvested by custom combining crews. A major problem with profitable wheat production is the difficulty of moving the harvest rapidly to storage in the large grain elevators that dot the Plains. Competition from truck hauling and, in parts of the winter wheat region, barge transport has encouraged the railroads to abandon many small country grain elevators in favor of much larger complexes usually in larger towns.

Most export wheat moves through the Great Lakes or in barges down the inland waterway system and the Mississippi River. Sorghum has emerged as a major crop on the southern Plains in recent decades. Able to withstand dry growing conditions, this African grain now equals winter wheat in importance on the hot, dry southwestern margins of the Plains.

Both Texas and Nebraska now have more land in sorghum than in wheat. Most of the grain sorghum crop is used as stock feed. On the northern Plains, barley and oats are major second crops, with most of the continent's barley crop coming from the Lake Agassiz Basin of North Dakota and Minnesota.

Nearly all flaxseed produced in North America also is grown in the northern Plains. Sunflowers, a source of the vegetable oil canola and important ingredients in many livestock feeds, are rapidly increasing in importance in the Red River Valley of Minnesota and North Dakota. Irrigation in the United States is usually associated with the dry region of the far West. Yet the benefits derived from irrigation may be higher in many semihumid or even humid areas--in terms of the level of increased production per dollar invested--because irrigation water may be used either as a supplement in dry times to maximize yields for crops already grown in the area or to grow crops for which the available moisture is not quite sufficient.

There are a number of Great Plains areas where large-scale irrigation developments are important. The area is underlain by the Oglala aquifer, a vast underground geologic reservoir under , square kilometers of the area that contains an estimated 2 billion acre-feet of water. An acre-foot is the volume of irrigation water that covers 0.

This is "fossil" water, much of it deposited more than a million years ago. About a quarter of the aquifer's area is irrigated, almost entirely with Oglala water. The High Plains is a major agricultural region, providing, for example, two-fifths of America's sorghum, one-sixth of its wheat, and one-quarter of its cotton. Irrigated lands here produce 45 percent more wheat, 70 percent more sorghum, and percent more cotton than neighboring nonirrigated areas. Groundwater withdrawals have more than tripled since , to more than 20 million acre-feet annually.

Early in the 20th century, the area centered on Lubbock, Texas, became a significant region of cotton production. Irrigated farming, using water from wells drilled into the water-bearing sands that underlie much of the southern High Plains, gradually replaced the early dry-farming approach.

Today, the region is the most important area of cotton production in the United States. More than 50, wells supply irrigation water in the area. The second major irrigated area on the Plains is in northeastern Colorado, with sugar beets the primary specialty crop. The area has long been irrigated from wells and from the waters of the South Platte River.

The federal government covers the cost of construction, and those who use irrigation pay for the water. Because these waters are no longer adequate to meet demands, the government funded the Big Thompson River project, which is designed to carry water from the west slope of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains to the east slope and the irrigated lands beyond. The most striking technological feature of this project is a kilometer tunnel, lying 1, meters below the Continental Divide in Rocky Mountain National Park.

The largest of the water impoundment projects on the Plains is the Missouri Valley project. The project was an outgrowth of two different sets of needs. Louis, needed an effective system of flood control. Copyright Notice. Return to Originating Page.

The Great Plains cover parts of ten states in the western part of the country. It stretches all the way from Texas to Montana and up into Canada - totaling over half a million square miles. The Rocky Mountains are just to the west of the Great Plains.

A flat, dry land with low rainfall Low rainfall - typically less than 20 inches a year - makes it a dry area. There are not many trees except along rivers and creeks. Windmills that pump water from wells are still common sights even on modern farms. Grass covered The Great Plains originally were covered with tall prairie grass. Today areas that are not planted with farm crops like wheat are usually covered with a variety of low growing grassy plants.

Once upon a time: the wild buffalo The Great Plains once supported enormous wild buffalo herds, which could survive in the dry conditions. The arrival of settlers on the plains led to the destruction of much of the buffalo population after about In the Plains, these immigrants competed for space and resources with Indigenous peoples such as the Pawnees and Osages.

When Native Americans, encircled by European American settlers, were forced to give up their ancestral lands in the second half of the nineteenth century, they remained on the Great Plains, either on reservations that were remnants of their former territories, or amassed in Indian Territory later Oklahoma. In the Prairie Provinces, First Nations ceded their lands to the government in a series of treaties between and , before the main rush of immigration.

Like their American counterparts, they retained reserves on the Plains and continue to be a major component of Plains identity. This is a component that will only increase in importance, because Native peoples are increasing faster than Plains population as a whole, and they are a young population, with growth built in to their demographic structure.

The list of defining characteristics could go on. The region has been, and continues to be, mainly a producer of raw materials for others to refine. Furs were the first such product, then cattle, corn, wheat, oil, gas, and coal. There is significant manufacturing on the Great Plains, mainly agriculturally based and mostly small scale, but the percentage of total employment in manufacturing is well below the national averages of Canada and the United States.

The Great Plains can also be defined by its demographic structure: no other region of North America has a higher percentage of aged population. In many Plains communities, the young have departed, drawn to opportunities outside the region, leaving farms without the next generation and schools closed for want of students. This was not always the case, of course. The Great Plains was settled by young families, but the aged structure of Plains population now makes the region more dependent on government transfer payments Medicare and social security, for example than any other in North America.

The Great Plains has also been a significant source of protest, as in North Dakota in when the Nonpartisan League gained control of the legislature and temporarily wrested control of credit and elevators from Minneapolis corporate power. Three years later, while the Nonpartisan League was still in power in North Dakota, to the north of the forty-ninth parallel one of the largest general strikes in North American history was staged in Winnipeg, shutting down factories, newspapers, telephones, and transportation.

The Board of Education of Topeka. Protest, of course, is not particular to the Great Plains, but there is a tradition in the region, and it is yet another defining trait. No region, of course, is a discrete entity, and the authoritative lines on a map belie the reality of transitions and gradations on the ground. In fact when fifty different delimitations of the Great Plains were mapped by Sonja Rossum and Stephen Lavin, the nebulous nature of regional boundaries became very clear.

Yet we felt it was important to define the boundaries of the purpose of this study—to specify the portion of North America that we recognize as the Great Plains. Indeed, there are few regional boundaries anywhere that are as decisive as the discontinuity between plains and mountains in Colorado and Alberta. But even the western boundary is blurred in places: in the Wyoming Basin, for example, where the Great Plains rise to more than 7, feet and merge less perceptibly with the Rocky Mountains, or in Montana, where extensions of the Rocky Mountains, such as the Little Rockies, interpenetrate with the Plains.

Still, differences in elevation, vegetation, and human occupancy specifically, the widely discontinuous settlement patterns in the Rocky Mountains demarcate the Great Plains from the regions to the west. The northern boundary in Canada is also quite distinct, tracing the line between the Parkland Belt of mixed woodland and grassland and the boreal forest of the north.

The Parkland Belt of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, since the time when Assiniboines and Crees followed bison herds, has been functionally integrated with the Prairies. This integration persisted through the fur-trade period and into the subsequent era of agricultural settlement. Canadian scholars are in accord on this matter. Scholars also agree that there are more similarities than differences in land and life on either side of the forty-ninth parallel, marking the international boundary between the United States and Canada.

Indians and fur traders crossed the border with impunity in the first half of the nineteenth century, and even after , when the railroads connected the Canadian Prairies and the northern American Plains to their respective eastern control points mainly Winnipeg and Minneapolis , parallel developments and common experiences were the norm. Land laws and settlement systems were similar. Both sections experienced agrarian protest movements and the drought and depression of the s.

Each had its open-range cattle era, and the Canadian grasslands were largely stocked from Montana. No doubt, the North American Free Trade Agreement nafta will result in even more interaction between these two national components of the same geographic region. A strong case can also be made for a distinctive southern boundary of the Great Plains. Climatically the lands to the south of the Rio Grande are true desert.

The southeastern edge of the Great Plains is marked by the prominent Balcones Escarpment, which was, historically, also a cultural divide marking the western extent of the cotton belt and the South. This leaves the eastern boundary of the Great Plains, which is not a sharply defined line but an almost imperceptible transition zone from the more humid South and Midwest. The difficulty in identifying the eastern entry onto the Plains was described by Robert Pirsig as he rode his motorcycle west from Minnesota into North Dakota.

The "greenness" encountered farther east had also paled, the streets of the towns were wider, the buildings more run-down. Pirsig concluded that there was less concern with "tidily conserving space" on the wide-open Great Plains.

To compensate for this geographical nebulousness, Plains scholars have sought to define the eastern margin by an arbitrary line, generally the 98th meridian, less frequently the th meridian. Perhaps a better definition of the eastern boundary would use a combination of physical, historical, and geopolitical factors.

Our boundary follows the eastern border of the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas, including these entire units in the region.

These states were organized and settled later than the adjoining states to the east, and their institutions and iconographies give them a coherence that should not be divided. The rationale for the eastern boundary in Manitoba is based on physical and economic geography: Eastern Manitoba is part of the Laurentian Shield and its orientation is to Northern Ontario, not the Prairie Provinces. Eastern Oklahoma and eastern Texas are also excluded from the Plains because of overwhelming evidence that historically, environmentally, and culturally their orientation is to the South.