Nothing can stop them. Sometimes they blow down houses and barns, uproot big trees and carry men and horses for long dis tances through the air. Fortunately these tornadoes are rarely more than a quarter of a mile wide, usually less than that, and ex tend only a mile or a very few miles. It is fortunate that they seldom occur. Out of 1000 thunderstorms, 999 bring merely rain and cooler weather with out a tornado.
73. The thundershower and summer rain.—The thundershowers provide most of the summer rain in all of the states east of the Mississippi River. They are very good for crops because they give moisture; but since they are soon over, their clouds do not for long keep away the sunshine which is so necessary for good plant growth. Taken all together, the Prairie Corn and Small Grain Belt has a climate which is very favorable for the farmer.
74. The four-crop farm.— Look at the resources this region possesses: rich soil; smooth, nearly level land ; good rainfall, and a health ful climate. No wonder it is the greatest food-producing region in North America.
Many of the farms in this great region are still one fourth of a square mile in size, and contain 160 acres. The farmer often has four fields—one field in corn, one in wheat or oats, one in hay, and one in pasture. Some times the farmer has no pasture field, choosing in stead to have two fields of corn. Why does he raise several crops? Because ir this way there will be work at different seasons for him self, his teams, and his ma chinery. By raising severa. crops, he has more steady employment, since the crop need attention at different times.
A farmer often plans his work as follows. In spring. when the snow melts, and the ground dries so that it can be worked without be coming lumpy, the farmer.
while the weather is yet cool, prepares his last year's cornfield for oats. Oats like cool weather. Next, he plows a field for corn, and when all danger of frost is over he plants that heat-loving crop. The oat crop require: no work from planting time until harvest, so the months of May and June are free for busy times in the cornfield. The young corn plants must be cultivated repeatedly to keep out the weeds, which otherwise would take the plant food away from the corn. By late June or early July, when the weeds in the cornfield are killed, the corn plants are as high as the farmer's waist and need no more care until harvest-time. Meat,
oats, and hay now ripen, and the fanner is very busy cutting these crops and putting them into barns or stacks.
Soon the threshing machine, drawn by a tractor that is to run it, comes groaning up the dusty road to thresh the oats or wheat.
In August the Corn Belt farmer has a little vacation, and can cut the weeds along the roadside, repair the fences, and visit his friends. In September, October, and No vember, he is busy again, harvesting the corn and planting winter wheat. The farm wagon must be filled many times to take the ears of corn from the field to the corncrib. Some times there are as many as eighty or one hundred bushels on each of the acres planted in corn. As you travel through Ohio, In diana, Illinois, and Iowa in the summer, you see fields of corn, corn, corn, until you wonder what can be done with it all.
In the central and northern parts of the Prairie Corn and Small Grain Belt, the farmer usually grows oats in addition to corn, because (1) oats love moisture, and do well in cool places; (2) they usually follow corn in the scheme of crop rotation, and (3) they are used as the feed crop for work animals. In the southwestern part of this region, a farmer usually raises wheat, much wheat, instead of oats, because it does well with less rain than corn or oats require. Here wheat is planted in the autumn, lives through the winter, and is harvested in June and July.
75. Farm animals.—In the eastern part of the Prairie Corn and Small Grain Belt, near Chicago and other markets, the farmer often sends his corn, oats, and hay to the city to be sold. But farther west, in Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska, most of the corn, oats, and hay are fed to the animals on the farm, so that instead of having to pay freight on ten pounds of corn and hay, the farmer pays freight on only one pound of pork or beef. The animal, you see, is an economical way of sending the bulkier prod uce to market. The maps of corn produc tion and hog production (Figs. 56, 58) show that this grain and these animals are produced in the same places; indeed, the corn may be said to make the pork.