Animal Farming in the Chesapeake Colonies

The Chesapeake colonies were established by English settlers near Chesapeake Bay in North America in the seventeenth century. Tobacco production was the main source of income, but colonists also owned some livestock brought from England. Although some planters enclosed cattle at night, generally, the disadvantages of enclosing livestock far outweighed the benefits. Building fences and sheds was fairly easy, but feeding animals confined within them was not. Modern cows eat about two percent of their weight in hay each day, and adult pigs consume five or six pounds of food daily. Colonial farmers, already hard-pressed to tend their tobacco fields, could not clear and plant another few acres just for their livestock or spare the labor to gather hay or build barns in which to keep it. It was far easier to let livestock find their own food, and so colonists abandoned English practices of confining livestock in favor of letting their animals run at large. But colonists had to set aside lands where the animals could graze (eat grass or other plants). Because woodlands did not provide optimal grazing, farmers substituted quantity for quality. Just one free-ranging cow needed as much as five acres (about two hectares) of pinewoods to sustain itself in summer and fifteen acres in winter. Even poorer planters, with perhaps ten cows and as many pigs, needed access to 150 or more acres of woods to support their animals.

Because of their dispersal, the animals' impact on the environment remained limited so long as their population density in any one location stayed low. Over time, however, rising numbers of livestock gradually altered the woodlands that supported them. Cattle set loose in pine forests foraged selectively on grasses and the undergrowth of oaks and other hardwoods. Pigs went after acorns and seeds on the forest floor, but also killed smaller trees by chewing on their roots. Where animals tended to congregate, near clearings and streams, they compacted the soil and crushed ground covers, encouraging erosion. Environmental changes were at first minor, but livestock nonetheless initiated a set of alterations that reduced the land's capacity to sustain them. This development, in turn, encouraged livestock to range further afield and their owners to appropriate more land for them.

By the 1670s, a seemingly relentless flood of English settlers lined the shores of Chesapeake Bay, pushed up the James, Rappahannock, and Potomac Rivers, and occupied the narrow peninsula of the Eastern Shore. Prospective planters were constantly on the lookout for good land near water transportation and plenty of forest for their livestock. They acquired as many acres as possible so they could abandon old fields for new and find fresh grazing for animals on their estates. Good neighbors, or at least close ones, were a secondary consideration. The demands of tobacco and livestock conspired to keep colonists spread out along rivers, a quarter of a mile or more apart. With such dispersed settlement, marketplaces were slow to appear, churches to gather, and towns to form. Protecting the interests of free-range animals hardly accounted for all of these developments, but the colonists' style of raising animals certainly contributed to them. If cows were supposed to promote cultural change-the colonists hoped that raising cows would lead Native Americans to adopt a more English way of life-the character of colonial Chesapeake society suggests that they failed at their task.

Had they been able to examine their own behavior objectively, Chesapeake colonists would surely have been stunned to see how far they had drifted from English practices. Though they considered themselves thoroughly English, they acted more like native farmers than English farmers. They lived in small clusters scattered along waterways, as Native Americans did, instead of settling in large towns. They grew native crops of corn and tobacco using native-style hoes, not English plows. Like native farmers, they let exhausted fields lie unused for decades and cleared new plots, putting little effort into enclosing land and none into fertilizing it. Although colonial women could hardly disassemble their houses and carry them on their backs, as native women customarily did, the colonists' material goods evoked a sense of sparseness and impermanence usually reserved for descriptions of Native American villages.