Corn also makes the beef and mutton. Each year hundreds of thousands of sheep and cattle come east by train from the ranches in the dry western country to the Corn Belt farms, to eat and become fat. In July a farmer may have no animals except his team, but late in summer he may buy sixty cattle or five hundred sheep to be fat tend in the winter and sold in the spring. These ani mals arrive lean, but after a few months of fattening on the Corn Belt farm they are sent on to the meat packing plants in the cities, especially to Chicago, Cin cinnati, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Omaha. There a pig or an ox is made into more than a hundred different commercial products. Noth ing is wasted. Even the bones are made into knife and brush-handles, buttons, and bone meal for fertilizer.
76. Cities.—There are few very large cities in this region. (Figs. 21, 54.) The nearly level farmland on the Prairies makes it easy for railroads to reach any point; therefore, in this region one place is about as good for a city as another. It is for this reason that many of the cities are about the same size. Columbus, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Omaha, Des Moines, and Topeka are rail road centers for shipping corn and animals from surrounding farms; each has meat packing plants, factories for making farming implements, and many wholesale and retail stores to supply the surrounding country.
St. Louis has become larger than any of the other cities, because there steamboats can help the railroads with the traffic. The city has a great wholesale trade with the rich region to the southwest. It has a lumber supply from the Ozark Plateau (Fig.21), and its factories, employing thousands of people, manufacture machinery, shoes, clothing, and many other articles.
St. Louis has not grown so rapidly in the last twenty years as have Chicago, Detroit and New York, which are located where summers are cooler, and where deep-water steamships can help to move freight. (Fig. 315.) We shall find later (Sec.321) that Chi cago, which is just outside the Prairie Corn and Small Grain Belt, is largely supported by products from and trade with this region.
77. Extending the Corn area of the corn country is increasing because people are learning to grow corn farther north and farther west. New and improved varieties of corn are being found, some of which need less water than the old varieties. (Sec. 108.) For this reason the Corn Belt is steadily creeping westward into the land of less rain.
Some new varieties grow more quickly than the old varieties, and therefore can ripen in the shorter summer of the north. For this reason the Corn Belt is creeping steadily north as well as west. Several weeks before it is ripe enough to use as grain, the whole corn plant can be put into a silo (Fig. 55) and kept. How does the silo move the northern limit of the Corn Belt? 78. Agricultural future of the region.— There is no other such grain belt in the entire world. Land does not increase, but popula tion does. Consequently the world wants each year more wheat and meat, and the price of these foods has been rising most of the time since 1900. The Prairie Corn and Small Grain Belt sends these products to nearly every part of the United States which lies to the eastward and southward. Europe and the West Indies also buy them. The high price of produce makes the American farmer able to pay a higher price for his farm. Thus land that was given away in 1860 and 1870 is now worth as much as $200 or even $300 an acre. What does it cost to get a 160-acre farm now? What did it cost fifty or sixty years ago? (Sec. 54.) This region is unlike the Cotton Belt and Florida in that nearly all the land is already in use. To obtain more produce the farming methods are being steadily improved, and crop yields are increasing year by year. But strange to say, the farm population is de creasing in many sections. One reason for this is that so many new machines have been invented for doing farm work. The most important new farm-machine is the tractor. (Fig. 17.) By means of it and other ma chines, the farmer can cultivate more acres, and therefore he needs less help. This is one reason why the farm population is de clining in numbers. Each year people move from the farms of this region to Canada, to our own western states, and to the cities in many parts of our country.
79. Development of manufacturing.— Thus far the manufacturing has been chiefly preparing meat and cereals for the market, and making machinery, fencing, and farm supplies. Aside from food or machinery, the lead ing manufactured article for shipment to other re gions is automobile tires, of which Akron is the chief manufacturing center in the United States. Manu facturing in general is in creasing, especially in the cities of the eastern part of this region. The coal map (Fig. 44) shows the loca tion of good supplies of coal.
This region is rich in