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I n their 1961 study of the Soil Bank, economists R. C. Buse and R. N. Brown Jr. did not foresee that absentee ownership would accompany land concentration. They saw probable patterns emerging when the Soil Bank ended, but not particular kinds of new owners from particular places. In Liberty, the pattern assumed the form of out-of-state family corporations that specialized in beef production. In other places the details would have been different; there might have been another kind of landowner , another specialization, or an even higher concentration of property . Regardless, you could produce maps similar to figure 5 for countless rural locales. This map and others like it are significant because of the larger patterns they show. They are also significant because they provoke local questions. “Who are these men?” asked the nearby La Farge Epitaph, in a passage that was speaking specifically of the changes in Liberty. Media usually focus on the local and the personal. Television, radio, and newspaper alike scrutinize individual contenders in land use debates: the rural landowner versus the 47 2 A Midwestern Ranch Bulldozers roared, woodlots were dozed into ditches, buildings were smashed and burned and soon scores of the small family farms were gone forever. The land that had produced poets, dreamers, willing hands for industry, friends and neighbors were soon all gone to be replaced with a pasture for a herd of beef cattle. Cattle whose owners didn’t give a hoot whether they made a profit or just returned a deduction on their income tax. Who are these men who have destroyed the beauty spots, the bubbling springs, the prized woodlots, the ethereal little coves where the lady slippers and trilliums grew in profusion? —Kickapoo Valley weekly newspaper, The La Farge Epitaph, May 17, 1978 government agent, the rancher versus the environmentalist. Academics ask the same question—who are these people? A wide sociological literature has looked for answers, parsing landowners by livelihood, income, educational achievement, and numerous other measures of a person’s demographic place in the world. Hundreds of surveys have tried to tease out a link between socioeconomic status and environmental attitudes, values, and beliefs. Many researchers then take a leap, attempting to predict future behavior of different types of owners.1 One study concluded that highly educated absentee owners were more likely to be good forest stewards than poorer, less-educated local landowners.2 As we will see, such a study does not capture the everyday complexity of owners in places like the Kickapoo Valley. Inevitably though, people will personalize the property lines. 48 landscape succession Figure 5. Land shown in black was converted to beef ranches between 1965 and 1995. Representative parcel lines are from 1978. Both the impersonal patterns and the personal questions miss the elemental reality of landownership. Woodlots dozed, lamented the Epitaph— family farms gone, friends and neighbors. These are all relational images, concerned with neither the pattern nor the individual but with relationships . Landownership does not exist outside of the relationships that de- fine it. Neither can landowners, even absentee landowners, be understood apart from the local landscapes and people with whom they have interacted . An environmental history like this one offers a counterpoint and alternative to landowner surveys: first, by looking closely at how the landscape changes as land changes hands; second, by contrasting different cultural perspectives with the change, instead of assuming the connection; and finally, by returning to the larger historical and ecological contexts within which people and their landscapes have reshaped each other. While the first chapter was a macrohistory of soil conservation and property dynamics, this chapter will be a brief microhistory of land ownership in Liberty. My aim is to place absentee beef ranchers within the community and ecological relationships that gave meaning to their tenure. A Midwestern Ranch 49 After 1965 small locally owned farms like this one in Liberty became surrounded by absentee land ownership. (Courtesy of Wolfgang Hoffmann) As Liberty’s largest landholder in the 1990s, Robert (Bob) Gjerdingen could have challenged the interpretive abilities of the most meticulous survey giver. Gjerdingen called himself a rancher, because of his beef cattle. Likewise he called his place a ranch. The exception was when he talked about the dairy herd he also owned. Then he called himself a farmer, and his place became a farm. Like most ranchers and farmers in the Kickapoo Valley, Bob Gjerdingen had another job off the land. But...

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