The Official Northern Pacific Railroad Guide: For the Use of Tourists and Travelers...(1893) was an unlikely place to find a description. This section pertained to North Dakota, but it would have been applicable to any northern prairie:
Prairie Farming.»The cultivation of the soil in prairie country is, in some of its processes, very different from the methods pursued elsewhere, and has given rise to at least two technical terms which are known as "breaking" and "backsetting". Premising that the prairie soil is free from roots, vines and other obstructions, and that the virgin sod is turned from the mould board like a roll of ribbon from one end of the field to the other, a fact is presented to farmers who are accustomed to plow among stones, stumps and roots can scarcely grasp. But the sod thus turned is so knit together by the sturdy rootlets of the rank prairie grass that a clod of large size will not fall apart even though it be suspended in mid-air.
To “break” or plow this mat, therefore, it is necessary to cut it, not only at the width of the furrow it is desired to turn, but underneath the sod at any thickness or depth as well. An ordinary plow could not endure the strain of breaking prairie soil, so plows called "breakers" have been constructed to do this special work.
(Rolling coulter pic from The Oliver Plow Book, 1920)
Usually, three horses abreast are employed, with a thin steel, circular coulter, commonly called a "rolling coulter," to distinguish it from the old-fashioned stationary Coulter, beveled and sharpened for a few inches above the point of the plow to which it is attached.
A furrow is broken sixteen inches wide and three inches thick, and the sod, as a rule, is completely reversed or turned over. Each team is expected to break sixteen miles of sod, sixteen inches wide and three inches thlck, for a days' task.Sounds simple, right?
By cutting the sod only three inches thick, the roots of the grasses, under the action of heat and moisture, rapidly decay. The breaking season begins about the 1st of May, and ends about the 1st of July. The wages of men employed at this kind of work are $20 per month and board. The estimated cost of breaking is $2.75 per acre, which includes a proportionate outlay for implements, labor and supplies. But the ground once broken is ready for continued cultivation, and is regarded as having added the cost of the work to its permanent value. Tbe“broken" land is now with propriety termed a farm.
“ Backsetting” begins about the 1st of July, just after breaking is finished, or immediately after the grass becomes too high, or the sod too dry, to continue breaking with profit. This process consists in following the furrows of the breaking, and turning the sod back,with about three inches of the soil.
In doing this work, it is usual to begin where the breaking was begun, and when the sod has become disintegrated, and the vegetation practically decomposed. Each plow, worked by two horses or mules, will “backset” about two and a half acres per day, turning furrows the width of the sod. The plows have a rolling coulter in order that the furrows may be uniform and
clean, whether the sods have grown together at their edges or not. The “ backsetting" having been done, there only remains one other operation to fit the new ground for the next season's crop. This is cross-plowing (plowing crosswise, or across the breaking or backsetting), or so-called fall plowing which is entered upon as soon as the threshing is over, or on damp days during the threshing season. A team of two mules will accomplish as much cross-plowing in a day as was done in backsetting--two and a half acres.
