The history of the Southeast and cattle ranching is complex.  It is marked by a varied landscape, from the piney woods of the Deep South to the sandy soils of South Florida, to the lush woods and mountains of Appalachian Country.  Early cattle trade and production were marked by Spanish and French influence, as well as English influence via Barbados, Jamaica, and northern colonies.

 Open range cattle ranching was prevalent in the South up until the Reconstruction period when plantation owners and other planters pushed for Stock Laws requiring livestock owners to fence in their animals.  The Stock Laws stirred up ferverent controversy, as Stock Laws posed a great threat to the meager livelihood of poor people who owned subsistence cattle but no land.  As cotton production increased as a means of recuperating losses brought on by the war, cotton fields replaced more open rangeland. 

South Carolina was host to a booming cattle industry in the colonial era.  The “Cowpen”, which developed in South Carolina in the colonial period, was the first form of fencing cattle in America, “cowpen” being the original word for the American “ranch”.  The cowpen became a place for branding and milking. South Carolinians also developed a woodland cattle herding system and drove cattle trough the pine belt of the south, where their influence reached as far as east Texas.

The cowpens disrupted the American Indian tribes in the region, who found the cattle were eating forage of their deer and infringing on their lands.  They were unaccustomed to a culture where animals were kept as livestock.  Spanish and French Missionaries introduced cattle raising to tribes, and later Thomas Jefferson encouraged tribes to increase their livestock numbers, believing it encouraged assimilation.  By the early 1800’s the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks, and Seminoles had all taken to raising cattle as means of trade.  By 1810, the Cherokees owned 19,500 cattle, 19,600 hogs, and 6,100 horses that they grazed on their former hunting grounds.  Jealousy of the tribes’ economy rose and although Jefferson claimed to have purchased Louisiana Territory land for Americana Indians who refused assimilation, Jackson systematically forced all of the Five Civilized Tribes to Okalahoma Indian Territory.  Although they attempted to bring their herds with them, only a fraction of the herds actually made it through the arduous journey.  Cattle eventually aided the tribes in coming to terms with the Oklahoma plains; they established a trading economy with forts, government agencies, and Texas cattlemen.   As the herds grew, the land they worked became famous for its good grazing qualities.  Texas cattlemen sometimes intermarried into the Choctaw families as a means to acquiring rights to their strong ranches and land.   Their success in raising cattle and growing herds on the plains demonstrated the agricultural potential of the plains as profitable grazing land.  Their plains ranching methods developed before the Civil War marked a precursor to the expansion of the cattle industry on the Western plains in the following decades.

 The Civil War was a period of decimation for cattle herds of the Southeast.  After the War, however, positive changes were made to improve agriculture and livestock raising methods.  These changes were brought on by the Morill Act of 1862, which created Land Grant Universities, aimed at improving agricultural education and research.  New research and education institutes in Alabama included the Tuskegee Institute (1881); the Canebrake Experiment Station; and the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station (1883).  The land grant colleges initiated Cooperative Extension services and introduced new grasses to improve grazing, including the tall fescue, hybrid Bermuda grass, white clover, bahiagrass, lespedeza, and red clover.

The 20^th century marked period of modernization for the cattle industry in the South, with fenced grazing land, purebred cattle, artificial pastures and industrialized slaughterhouses.  There are some good grass-fed farming operations in the Southeast, which are aided by the long grass-growing season.