Why was cattle ranching not practical on the prairies originally?

Answer 1

Actually, ranching is and always has been practical on the prairies or in grasslands. That is where ranching has always taken place, even in the Old World. However, since cattle had meant money, none of the ranchers paid any attention to what was under their feet and how it affected their ability to graze their cattle. They had come with the mind set that if there was lots of grass available, it was worthwhile to overstock the pasture or range to grow a lot of cattle on. Ranchers didn't pay attention to the fact that they were overgrazing and thus killing rangeland by their overstocking practices. They also didn't know about properly grazing native grasslands so that they were increasing biomass rather than decreasing it. Because of these mismanagement practices and uneducatedness about how to manage grass properly, two things happened: Thousands of cattle died in the Great Winter of 1886 to '87, and massive dust storms blew up during the time of the Dirty Thirties (c. 1930 to 1939). It likely for these reasons that you are asking that ranching on the prairies was "not practical" originally.