The other day at work, someone was talking about their homebrew hobby (beer, not computers). They explained that you can reuse brewing yeast from batch to batch—cultivating it, basically—and that this technique goes by the name of yeast ranching.
It made for a funny picture, thinking about little yeasties being herded and corralled. Do yeast wranglers wear distinctive hats? Are there yeast rodeos?
Anyway, this conversation got me thinking about the word ranch. Yeast is a single-celled organism, classified as a kind of fungus; it’s not an animal. I’m a city boy, so I’m not expert in the terminology of raising crops and animal husbandry and whatnot. My first thought was that ranch is a place where people have animals (livestock), like a cattle ranch. And that when you grow plants, you’ve got yourself a farm. So should cultivating yeast be something you do on a yeast farm, not a yeast ranch?
Funny interlude: another colleague in this conversation is from the UK. We asked what they thought a ranch was, the answer was “A place you get salad dressing?” Haha.
It turns out to have been a good conversation for increasing my understanding of the terms ranch and farm.
As far as English goes, farm is the way older term. The roots are a bit confused. In Norman times we got the word farme or ferm from French to refer to a lease of land. In the 1300s, a ferme might refer to an amount of grain that a tenant would pay to use a piece of land. I was surprised to read that this “lease” sense of farm was in use into the 1700s.
I say “confused” because Old English also had the Germanic word foerm that could refer to food paid as a levy. As it says in the OED, this Germanic sense might have influenced the later French-based sense.
In any event, by the 1400s, ferme was used to refer not just to the lease but to the land that was leased. And from there, it extended to refer to any land used for agricultural purposes, leased or owned.
Thus my first lesson: farm is a broad term that covers not just growing crops, but also raising animals. A contemporary definition (in Merriam-Webster) has it as “a tract of land devoted to agricultural purposes” and “a plot of land devoted to the raising of animals and especially livestock.” Oh, right. A wheat farm. A dairy farm. A pig farm.
Where does ranch and ranching come into all this, and how does it relate to farm and farming?
Back to M-W, which tells me that a ranch is “a large farm for raising horses, beef cattle, or sheep.” So a ranch is also a type of farm. But wait: they use the word large, and they have a pretty specific list of the animals you might find on a ranch, like beef cattle (but not dairy cows). An article from a land company explains that “the difference between a farm and a ranch is that all ranches are farms, but not all farms are ranches” and that a ranch “focuses on raising and herding hoven animals, typically cattle or sheep.”[1]
Where did we get ranch from? From Spanish, via American English. One sense of rancho in Spanish referred to a lodging for travelers or for people who eat together.[2] In Mexican Spanish, rancho came to refer the farm (presumably from its buildings) where people raised horses or cattle. Douglas Harper notes that in Spanish America, rancho was for herding and a hacienda was for cultivating.
We borrowed both senses of rancho into English—first the lodging sense and later the farm sense. By the early 1800s, we were using the terms rancho and the Anglicized ranch in English for both senses. And after WWII, developers started building ranch[-style] houses, which were single-story houses that it was practical to build in the suburbs where land was cheap.
Back to yeast. My take is that would not be wrong to talk about yeast farming, since you’re cultivating something that’s more plant than animal (and no hooves). But I acknowledge the, you know, linguistic satisfaction and humor value of referring to yeast ranching instead.
But I do wonder whether people refer to their sourdough starters as yeast ranches.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
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[1] In this sentence, hoven is an interesting error. I think they mean hoofed; the only definition I can find for hoven is references to an ailment that involves bloating. I think they used hoven by analogy with cloven (from cleave), perhaps thinking of hoven as an older irregular/strong past tense of hoof. [^]
[2] Communal eating also got us mess as in mess hall, and it got us companion from Latin com (“together”) and panis (“bread”). [^]