Pushing boxes and pulling folders from the massive Baldwin Corporation Records held for the Institute for Regional Studies at NDSU Archives, I come to the realization we have a lot to learn about life on the plains by rereading the considerable — I should say massive — documentation available in the reading room. Given that the papers of the Baldwin Farms in Dickey County alone comprise 32 feet of records, it’s a heck of a job.
What is to be gained by such work? Not just business transactions, but an unparalleled view of people on the land, interacting effectively with soils and crops and livestock. Possibly some lessons about possibilities of living with the land on the northern plains.
A handy introduction to the larger story is the master’s thesis in agricultural economics done at North Dakota Agricultural College in 1924 by Orville M. Fuller. Fuller was assistant farm manager for Baldwin Farms, headquartered in Ellendale; its holdings, which once comprised 70,000 acres or more, still sprawled across the county.
An investor from Wisconsin, George B. Baldwin Sr., accumulated the Baldwin holdings in the 1880s and 1890s. In his late years they were neglected — rundown and weed-infested. When he died in 1907, his sons, George Jr. and Charles, took over. They reorganized, consolidated, sold, but kept a lot of land — including a string of model farms stretching northeast from Ellendale, which they chose to call, perhaps embracing a bit of Western romance, “ranches.” Young Orville Fuller was in the middle of all this. His thesis shows that although his major was ag econ, his love was the agronomy of farm management on the ground. In the system of four ranches (averaging 1440 acres each) he managed with his local boss, J. W. McNary, he implemented ingenious, sustainable systems of operation — and the details matter.
Every headquarters had a ranch manager’s residence and a suite of buildings, mainly for livestock comprising fine cattle — Angus and Shorthorn — hogs, sheep, and horses. Horses because although the Baldwin operations tried tractor farming, they found horses and big hitches suited their operations — and contributed to their manure supply, which was important.
Livestock wintered at the headquarters sites, bedded with straw from the fall’s threshing, accumulated many tons of manure, all of which was spread on the fields within half a mile of the headquarters. These nearby fields carried a rotation of corn (which sometimes made grain, other times was chopped for silage), oats, corn, oats — oats needed for the horses. Raising corn on fall-plowed ground and cultivating it four times eliminated weeds. Sometimes instead of shucking the corn they hogged it down — turning pigs into the fields to do the work (and deposit manure).
Winter wheat (yes, winter wheat in 1924! — fall-sown in rye stubble for winter protection) was raised on the other lands, or sometimes barley, with a legume — alfalfa, or more commonly, sweet clover — in the rotation. “Sweet clover,” says Fuller, “tends to liven up the soil and add organic matter,” as well as furnishing pasture. Sheep were pastured on the wheat stubble — again, distributing manure.
Resident farmhands, employed all year in the diversified operations, slept at the headquarters and were fed by the manager’s wife. Some of the Shorthorn cattle were milkers. All in all, this was not your stereotypical bonanza farm. There is so much to be learned from the voluminous bonanza farm records little-used since the 1960s. You young scholars, pitch in.
