Noun

(en noun)

Large farm; estate or area of land designated for agricultural growth. Often includes housing for the owner and workers.

*{{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-29, volume=407, issue=8842, page=29, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= Unspontaneous combustion , passage=Since the mid-1980s, when Indonesia first began to clear its bountiful forests on an industrial scale in favour of lucrative palm-oil plantations , “haze” has become an almost annual occurrence in South-East Asia. The cheapest way to clear logged woodland is to burn it, producing an acrid cloud of foul white smoke that, carried by the wind, can cover hundreds, or even thousands, of square miles.}}

Area where trees are planted for commercial purposes.

The importation of large numbers of workers and soldiers to displace the local population, such as in medieval Ireland and in the Caribbean.

Noun

(en noun)

The business or activity of operating a ranch, of farming or raising livestock.

Ranching is his way of life.

A ranch.

* 1889 , an article on The Migrations of Plants'' by de Candolle, Stallybrass, Hooker and Wallace, published in ''The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal , volume 169, page 465:

At a later stage we may presume that other plants were found useful, such as the artificial fodder plants which began to be cultivated for cattle when the purely pastoral system of husbandry by nomad tribes came to an end, just as cattle ranchings will do in America at no distant date, it is said.

* 1938-1968', published in '''2001 in ''When prophecy still had a voice: the letters of Thomas Merton & Robert Lax, edited by Arthur W. Biddle , page 401:

(I am taken to mountains so high you can't breathe; step out of your capsule: zam! you are flat in the aspens. Surrounded in every dimension by solitary ranchings ; no sound but the lowing of kine, the flashings of cow-grass.)