1. This Land Is My Land… It Isn’t Your Land…
Farmers Do What They Want Chapter 5, Section 2 Notes

2. Acres…Get Your Acres… Homestead Act (1862)
The U.S. Gov’t offered 160 acres of free land to any citizen or intended citizen who was the head of household
What’s an example of an intended citizen?
Hint: Look at the date of the Homestead Act
Answer: A soon-to-be-freed slave
600,000 families went west from
Exodusters were African Americans who moved from the post-Reconstruction South to Kansas
Several thousand exodusters took the Homestead Act’s offer

3. Hardships…Get Your Hardships…
What hardships did frontier settlers face?
Droughts, fires, floods, blizzards, raids by outlaws and Indians, locust plagues, Adam and Eve’s betrayal (okay, I made the last one up)
Even though it was tough to make it, people still went—free land, make $!
The number of people living west of the Mississippi River grew from 1% in 1850 to 30% in 1900!

4. Prairies…Get your…Okay, this intro just isn’t working anymore…
How do you live on the prairie?
You do everything for yourself
Women and men worked the land together, made clothes, and ate only what they grew or killed

5. Matthew Lesko’s Favorite Slide
This is why inventions helped so much
Barbed wire: keep animals in
Reaper: save crops from dying by speeding up the harvest
Steel Plow: made planting more efficient (less crops died because the earth was better prepared for farming)
Steel Windmill: Brought up underground water for irrigation, preventing crop dehydration
(Matthew Lesko was
that guy…and on late
night infomercials
in the 1990s and
early 2000s talking
about FREE MONEY
you could find from the government)

6. Farms Are Good…We Like Farms
Morrill Act (1862, 1890)
Gave federal land to the states to help finance agricultural colleges
Hatch Act (1887)
Established agricultural experiment stations to inform farmers of new developments for better farming

7. Farmers Problems Bonanza Farms
Large single-crop spreads of 15,000-50,000 acres of land created by the railroad companies and investors
Machinery was expensive
When prices fell, farmers couldn’t afford to pay their farm’s mortgage because their crops weren’t making enough $$
In order to bring in more money, they had to sell more crops
How could they do that?
Buy more land…that’s why the bonanza farms were created
It was a short-term fix but a long-term problem
Why?

8. Farmers Problems
Answer: When prices fell again, farmers wouldn’t be able to pay again…what do they do? Buy more land or lose their land?
That’s a no-win situation
If farmers couldn’t pay their loans, the banks foreclosed the farms and took control of them to be resold in bankruptcy
This happened to many bonanza farms