CORN The biggest thing in this country is our corn crop. And the most wonderful thing about it is that each year the crop is bigger,— the miracle is repeated, more granaries are filled each time the autumn rolls around. Let us look at a few figures, and try to grasp their meaning. In 1910 our corn crop was worth over $1,500,000,000! Four times as much corn as was raised in all the cornfields of all the other continents. A procession of farmers' wagons, each loaded with fifty bushels of corn, and drawn by the farmer's team, would be long enough to reach nine times around the earth. For when a girdle is complete, there would be left in cribs and elevators eight times as much corn as was in that single line of wagons, twenty-five thousand miles long.
The great corn states are Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska. In 191o, Illinois raised 414 mil lion bushels, almost one third of the crop in the whole country. Large-eared dent corn is grown in the great "corn belt" of the central states. The yield per acre averages but twenty-seven bushels. Many farmers raise three times that
quantity. The northeastern states, that raise the round-grained flint corn, do not have a large acre age, but the average yield is high, despite their wornout land. Down South the average crop is much lower than in the corn belt, partly due to careless, unenlightened farming.
Of the stupendous corn crops raised in the United States only 4 per cent. goes to other countries as grain and meal. We feed the rest to cattle and hogs, and ship the meat. This brings the farmer much more money, and returns to the land much of the best fertilizing elements in the manure from the yards where stock is fattened. The man who sells his corn from the crib robs his land, year after year. He must fertilize it, and buying commercial fertilizers is a costly method.
Better corn and more of it result from careful selecting of seed, and sorting and testing it before planting time. This is an important step in the great forward movement in farming to-day.