wyoming farming

When the New Deal arrived in Wyoming, federal policy divided the state in two. In the west, the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 brought the public range under federal regulation for the first time, creating grazing districts and permit systems that permanently reshaped who could graze and how many animals. In the east, a more disruptive transformation was underway: federal programs concluded that much of the land homesteaded on the Great Plains should never have been farmed and set about moving the people who lived there off the land, returning it to grazing.

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.