drought

When the New Deal arrived in Wyoming in the 1930s, federal agents fanned out across the state buying and slaughtering cattle and reducing crops to combat the Depression-era crisis of overproduction. This article examines how the Agricultural Adjustment Administration’s production controls played out on Wyoming’s ranches and farms.

When the stock market crashed in October 1929, Wyoming’s farms and ranches were already struggling. What followed—collapsing markets, failing banks, and years of devastating drought—pushed the state’s agricultural economy to the breaking point. The Franklin Roosevelt administration’s New Deal offered relief, but it also brought federal power directly into Wyoming’s rangeland in ways that would permanently reshape the relationship between ranchers and the land they grazed.