DECEMBER 2018 • NEBRASKAland 43
History of the
Frank Ranch
In the 1930s, Frank's great
grandfather, Harry Frauen, ranched
with his brother east of Valentine. One
version of the family legend has it that
their wives did not get along so they
flipped a coin to see who would stay
on the ranch and who would leave.
"Great Grandpa lost the flip and was
bought out by his brother. So he bought
this place," Frank said with a laugh.
The less interesting version of the
story is that during the Dust Bowl the
Valentine ranch could not support two
families, so one had to move on.
The Bassett ranch has stayed in
the Frauen/Frank family ever since.
In 1976 after graduating from high
school in Minneapolis, Dan's father
Tom moved onto the ranch, working it
with his grandfather. A few years later,
he married his wife Deb. The couple
had two daughters, Nicole and Erin,
followed in 1988 by their son, Dan.
In 2006, Dan left the ranch to attend
the University of Nebraska earning a
degree in diversified agriculture and
a minor in grassland ecology. Like
his father, he returned to the ranch
shortly after graduating, working it
with his parents. Allyson, who grew
up on a Knox County ranch, met Dan
"serendipitously" in 2008 and joined
him on the ranch in 2011.
Broken Ground
The Sandhills, occupying 20,000
square miles of north-central Nebraska,
are our nation's most intact grassland
ecosystem. Farming in the Sandhills
was limited until the 1950s, when the
invention of the self-propelled center-
pivot irrigation system allowed, for the
first time, efficient irrigation of the dry,
sandy dunes. Since then, hundreds of
Center-pivot-irrigated cropland occupies former prairie on low Sandhill dunes in Keith County. Hundreds of thousands
of acres of Sandhills prairie has been lost to pivot development over the last half century.
