The Transition from Farming to Ranching in the Kansas Flint Hills

For more than a century the Flint Hills have been a stronghold of the livestock industry, an area of Kansas devoted almost exclusively to the feeding and breeding of cattle. One of the last large segments of tall grass prairie that once stretched from Canada to Texas and from Kansas to Indiana, the Flint Hills region covers some five thousand square miles of rolling hills and narrow valleys in east central Kansas. The Flint Hills embrace all or parts of thirteen counties: Butler, Chase, Chautauqua, Cowley, Elk, Geary, Greenwood, Lyon, Marion, Morris, Pottawatomie, Riley and Wabaunsee (fig. 1).