Continental North America has offered a generally hostile environment to the large landed estate. Outside the South, farms of large scale have had to compete with industry and trade for labor and investment funds and with the irrationally cheap labor of the small farmer for land and markets. Rarely in any branch of agriculture have the economies to scale of enterprise been sufficient to tip the advantage. In stock raising during the early settlement of the Corn Belt and in the bonanza wheat farms of the Red River Valley of the North during the 1870s and 1880s, the large holding met with transient success. In both cases its advantage rested on prior access to improved stock or mechanized techniques, which soon spread to the smaller enterprises. Only in the cattle and sheep ranches of the arid regions, beyond the reach of the field crops, and on Western truck farms holding a migratory labor force outside industrial labor markets has the large enterprise employing wage labor persisted. Even where debt and tenancy have interlaced the net of family-sized holdings, they have not – except in the South – involved significant concentrations of control. In this hostile environment the plantations formed before the Revolution could endure and spread across the South in competition with the free family farm only through access to a source of non-wage labor.