AND DISTRIBUTION IN THE UNITED STATES. The vast majority of American farmers are engaged in growing the great staple crops such as corn, wheat, cotton, oats, barley, potatoes, hay and tobacco, besides such products of animal industry as milk, beef, mut ton and wool. The problem of distributing these products has not been left to the farmer. They are produced on a scale large enough to tempt dealers of various kinds and classes to enter the field and take them off the farmer's hands or organize a distributing system. Ordi narily the farmer's responsibility ceases as soon as these products leave the farm, though some times he does his own shipping, that is, he ships to one of the large markets or distributing cen tres and sells to a large dealer. In either case he sells to a well-organized market and throws his products into a distributing system whose grooves are worn smooth by the quantities which flow through them.
The high development of the long-distance freight service of the American railroads, and the comparative neglect of the local freight service, has tended toward a rather extreme ter ritorial division of labor in the growing of the great staple crops. With long distance freight so efficient and so cheap as it is here, proximity to a market is no great advantage and is usually not sufficient to overcome even a slight physical disadvantage in the production of these crops. There is, therefore, a tendency for each crop to be grown in marketable quantities in those sec tions where the soil, climate and other condi tions are best suited to it, rather than in those sections which are nearest the centres of con sumption. Therefore, we have what may be called belts of production such as the cotton belt, the corn belt, the wheat belt, etc. To at tempt to grow wheat, for example, in Massa chusetts would prove uneconomical. Although the wheat grower in this State would be very close to a vast consuming population, he would save comparatively little in freight rates in com petition with the wheat grower of the far West. The latter, having such a marked advantage in the quality of his land, can easily pay the slight difference in freight rates and still drive his Eastern competitor out of the market. Even sonic of the more bulky and perishable products show the same tendency. Apples from the far West are regularly marketed in large quantities in the Eastern cities in competition with apples that are grown in the immediate neighborhood. Here again the advantages of a favorable cli mate and virgin soil seem to be sufficient to overcome the difference in freight rates.
Some of these producing belts or crop areas are fairly well defined and easily described; others are not. About 90 per cent of the orange crop of southern California is produced in a strip 10 miles wide and 60 miles long, lying at the foot of the Sierras. The cotton belt is a strip beginning in North Carolina and extend ing southwestward and westward to central Texas, lying in its eastern extremity midway between the mountains and the sea, widening as it approaches the Mississippi River and extend ing westward until it reaches the arid belt where lack of moisture prevents its further spread.
Small areas devoted to Egyptian cotton grown under irrigation are found in the far West, par ticularly in the Salt River valley of Arizona. The wheat belt is divided into two parts, the northern and the southern. In the northern belt where spring wheat predominates, though winter wheat is gaining ground, we find its greatest concentration in the valley of the Red River of the North. The southern belt, where winter wheat predominates, is noticeable in southern Indiana and Illinois, north central Missouri, but finds its greatest concentration in west central Kansas and Nebraska, along the border between what is conventionally called the humid and the arid belts. Another large producing area not included in either of these belts is found in eastern Washington. The corn belt is more difficult to describe for the reason that corn is grown in practically every county in the United States. That which is known as the corn belt, however, is the terri tory in which corn is the leading money crop and where it is grown on the largest percentage of the total acreage under cultivation. The belt thus defined is first noticeable in western Ohio. It extends through north central Indi ana and Illinois, covering the whole State of Iowa and northern Missouri, widening as it approaches the Missouri River and extending beyond that river to the borders of what is known as the humid belt,— that is, approximate ly to the hundredth meridian of longitude. It reaches its greatest density, however, in north central Illinois, particularly in a remarkable strip of prairie extending from the Wabash to the Illinois River. Its next greatest area of concentration is along the Missouri River from about the latitude of Sioux City, Iowa, on the north to St. Joseph, Mo., on the south. It is not customary to speak of an oats belt, probably for the reason that oats is nowhere grown as the principal crop, but it is largely grown in the corn belt in rotation with corn. Thus it happens that the area of largest oats production is identical with that of the largest corn production, with the same centres of con centration. There is nothing that could be called a potato belt, though there are several detached areas of large production, notably the eastern half of Aroostook County, Me., west ern New York, central Wisconsin and a small area in Minnesota just north of the twin cities. The greatest centre of apple production in the country is western New York. The Ozark region of northwestern Arkansas and south western Missouri is another area of concentra tion, as are also several valleys in southern Washington, northern Oregon and western Colorado.