Oakes 1

Lindsey Oakes
Leaver
AP HuG 1
3 May 2016
The Deer Farm
The cultural landscape, no matter the scale, is always changing as people develop
over time. The cultural landscape includes the combination of cultural features, such as
language and religion, or even economic features like agriculture and industry. The
physical environment also plays a large role in the cultural landscape. All of the
contributing factors can be changed by the way people choose to settle into rural land
because of the human interaction with the environment and the way settlement relates to
culture in different regions.
The development of people has led to many effects in the physical and cultural
landscape. Last summer, my family and I visited some relatives that lived about an hour
away in a small region outside of Rockwall, Texas. This small, southern region was
extremely small and hardly populated compared to the urbanized McKinney. Plenty of
land was dedicated to farming and pastures, which is exactly the type of business my
relatives run; only, its a bit specialized. My relatives are involved in raising and breeding
high quality deer. They own multiple pastures of land and fields to let their deer migrate
to different areas to feed. The deer are not domesticated, but raised like real wild deer to
the best of my relatives ability. They even have a small vegetative farm of their own, so
one can consider their home to be that of mixed farming. They changed the rural
environment they lived in so they could produce a stable, agricultural trading multi-

Oakes 2
purpose business and altered their cultural environment because of the local need for
deer.
There are specific reasons why my relatives decided to locate their farm in that
specific reason. One is that the land is practically a family heirloom, in which many
generations of my family have been raised upon. Another is the open land that allows the
deer to nomadically graze and feed upon. Lastly, they are located near many other
industries and traders in the south that require deer for their businesses. Their
relationships with other farming businesses in the area are especially important for local
market connections with other ranchers and for the theory supported by Von Thnen: the
balance between cost and distance from the market. Their own cultural landscape has
been changed by their rural home and business because of their need to connect with
other agriculture and farming industries. The new cultural landscape shows how people
use land to support themselves and the business around them.
People use much of the land around them to form agricultural business in rural
areas that will shape the cultural landscape of their lives and the regions around them. My
relatives who lived in rural Texas did just that with their deer farm and market relations.
The altering of the physical environment to build farms and ranches, as well as the
business of ranching and mixed crops are common trades when one lives in such a rural
area with southern culture.