We were out in the "desert" area where there wasn't a lot of water for irrigation. My great-grandfather (grandma's father) had served under Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War and received a land grant out in the desert. He'd recently immigrated from Bohemia after the family lost everything there to the Austrians. So a desert was better than no place at all, I guess. A lot of Czechs settled in around the Nebraska-Wyoming-Colorado tri-state area. The family still has a lot of ranch lands up that way.
Here's a Google Earth pic of my grandparent's farm. The black circle is (or was) their house and the out buildings including the barn, bunk house and garage. Primarily we were a dairy operation, though my grandfather also grew wheat and oats. As part of the dairy operation we raised calves for slaughter. Grandpa experimented with a few pigs for a couple of years but but gave it up. He was raised in Arkansas and I think he missed some of the things you could do if you had more water and cheaper feed.
The picture below makes it look like someone dragged a cultivator through the pastures.
The red circle at the bottom right was the home of the old hermit I mentioned. The "i" and the orange dot at the bottom right are the Minuteman III silo and the launch control center. "Malevolent" is the name given to that particular silo and its missile and warheads in more recent years. The command for the missile wing was at Warren AFB outside of Cheyenne, WY, which is why the silo has the "WY" attached to it. We're about 15 miles from the state line here. My dad's birth certificate read "Wyoming" even though he was born on the Colorado side of the line.
The line of bluffs to the north (top) took up a lot of my childhood. The picture is cropped a bit so you can't see the whole line. The bluffs were a hard and sharp congolerate across our property, but right after the fence line between us and the old hermit they softened up into chalk and sandstone. You would cut your hands up climbing on the hard stuff unless you wore gloves. But if you asked for a pair of gloves it kind of gave away the fact that you were climbing where you weren't supposed to. So we did our climbing on the hermit's bluffs. I couldn't begin to describe the wonders that could be found up in those bluffs. For a kid, it was a magical place.
As an idea of what the ground looked like, the Pawnee buttes were a few miles to the southeast. This was National Grasslands land. Lots of "antelope" (prong horn are not antelopes, technically speaking; but then who would the deer play with?), coyote, badgers, porcupine and many jack rabbits. There's a kind of a bird, a plover that nests on the ground. When you get close to its nest one of the plovers will start running in front of you trying to lead you away from its nest. This used to irritate me to no end when walking in the grasslands during spring. The stupid birds scrambling along and chirping pretending that they were injured and couldn't fly, almost made me want to injure a few just to be left alone. But my grandparents had strict rules about guns where we could shoot. Dairy farms are not suppoosed to get a lot of gun fire.
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