328. How the lakes make fruit crops.— The Lower Lake District is great in trade, great in manufacture, and it also has an interesting agriculture.
Owing to the lakes, this region rivals California in the amount of fruit it produces. One of the greatest dangers to fruit crops in the United States is the spring frost that kills the buds and flowers of the blooming trees. The lakes reduce the danger from spring freezing, because they are full of ice and cold water which keep the land near them cool until the end of May. Trees do not put forth leaves and buds in cool weather, so the danger of frosts is mostly past before orchards along the shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie begin to bud. Often there are good crops of fruit near the lakes in the same season when frosts kill the crop twenty miles inland. For this reason, orchards of apples, peaches, and cherries almost touch each other for miles and miles along the southern shore of Lake Ontario.
In June and July, men and women, boys and girls are picking wagonloads of cher ries to send to neighboring canneries. In August and September, peaches are picked, graded, packed in boxes and baskets, and sent off by carloads to the city markets. After the peaches are picked, the apple har vest begins, and for a month or six weeks everyone who can be persuaded to work is picking and sorting apples.
Thousands of carloads of apples are shippec from western New York to the markets anc cold-storage plants of cities as far distant a Boston, New Orleans, and Minneapolis. Across the Niagara River, in the little peninsula between Lakes Ontario, Erie, anc Huron, the Canadians are likewise busy witl crops of fruit.
The waters of Lake Michigan also protee the many orchards of peaches, apples, am cherries that grow close together along th? eastern shore. One morning in January 1920, the thermometer at Grand Haven Michigan, was 22° F., while directly acros the lake at Milwaukee it was 0°. At thil time the lake surface had no ice and the water temperature was, therefore, only 32° so that the slow-blowing southwesterly wins was warmed by the water in crossing the lake. A body of water as small as Green Bad protects fruit crops, and the little peninsuh between Green Bay and Lake Michigan ha many cherry orchards. Cherries for th? canning factory are the chief industry of the Lielanan Peninsula just across the lake.
The grape crop shows another example of the influence of water on climate and crops. Nearly all of the grapes grown east of Cali fornia, for shipment to market, are produced along the north and south shores of Lake Erie, especially along the eastern end, and along the several long, slender lakes, called finger lakes, in west central New York. (Figs. 30, 204.) In these-districts vineyards often join each other for miles along the lake shores. If you live east of the Mississippi, read the address on a basket of grapes that is for sale in October or November.
Fruit crops are also grown on the islands in Lake Erie near Sandusky, and on the two peninsulas that reach into Lake Superior.
329. Northern in its southern part, this district touches the Prairie Corn and Small Grain Belt, only a little corn is grown in it. The coolness of the lake waters causes corn to be absent from the lake-shore farms, although it may be grown only a few miles farther inland. Instead of corn, most of the farmers grow potatoes, sugar beets, and navy beans (Fig.
42). These three crops do well where it is too cool for corn. Many farmers also grow fields of peas, cabbage, tomatoes, and sugar corn (Sec. 247), all of which are taken to the canneries that are so common in the Ontario plain and in southern ,Michigan and lower Wisconsin. More work is required to grow these crops than to grow corn, oats, and hay, but the return per acre is greater. For this reason we say the agriculture is more intensive than that of the corn, oats, and hay farms.
330. Dairying.—Next to the fruit industry and the trucking industry, dairying is the chief industry of the entire region from Quebec to the suburbs of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Why do the farmers in the whole of this long region keep cows? Be cause cows will help the farmer to make a living on a small, rough farm in a place where the winter is long and the summer is cool. On the wide, level stretches of Kansas and Texas, a farmer can make his living by selling grain or feeding meat animals; but in the sections made hilly by glaciers, a farmer having a hundred acres of land often has only fifty acres that are fit to plow, the rest being woodlands or pasture. That farmer keeps cows, and has milk to sell daily instead of meat to sell once a year. The dairy farm has a pasture field, a hay field, an oat field, and sometimes a field of beets of a big, coarse kind that cattle like to eat. The only thing sold from a farm like this is milk, and from time to time some calves or cows.
331. The downs and ups of agriculture.— Between 1910 and 1920, thousands of farms in this region were abandoned because the people could make more money in the auto mobile and other factories. As the number of our people increases, and the rising price of food makes us give more attention to farm ing, this section can greatly increase the amount of fruit and vegetables grown in the plains along the lakes. It can also pro duce many more potatoes and much more butter and cheese in the hilly farms of Wis consin and Michigan, of Ontario and Quebec.
We find the dairying industry in the part of New York west of the Adirondacks, and in the part of Vermont that drains toward the St. Lawrence. It is especially important in the St. Lawrence Valley and Wisconsin.
332. Government aid to dairying we can see how teamwork, or organization, helps industry. Wisconsin has been the leading dairying state in the United States, partly because the state agri cultural college has given so many extension courses in dairying, that nearly every farmer in the state knows how to take care of cows, milk, and butter. Butter and cheese from Wisconsin and Minnesota are used in thousands of homes in New England and the Middle Atlantic States. But the Canadians have beaten the Amer icans in the export of cheese to Europe, because they guarantee the quality of their goods. In the United States, any person can send what he pleases to Europe. Some people have sent cheeses that were good on the outside but poor on the inside, so that the name "Yankee Cheese" means in England bad cheese. The Canadian Government will not let any cheese go out unless it has been officially inspected and stamped. This guarantee has won the market, and Ontario and Quebec alone export much more cheese than the whole of the United States.