38. Floods and levees.—When the snows melt in the North Central States and in the Appalachian Mountains, and heavy winter rains come at the same time, the Mississippi River often overflows its banks and covers large areas of the level land that it has built. To escape the floods, many people have to leave their homes by climbing out of the windows into boats that have been brought to rescue them. These floods do such great damage that men have worked for years to build big banks, called levees, along the edges of the stream, to hold the water back in times of flood. (Fig. 36.) Sometimes the river rises even higher than the banks. Sometimes a muskrat or a rotten tree root makes a hole in the bank, and there the water breaks through the levee, tears a great gap, flows out as a rushing river, covers up hundreds and thousands of farms, and may make a lake as big as two or three of the smaller New England States combined.
39. Corn, sugar and truck.—Corn is the second crop in value in the Cotton Belt. It is grown on almost every farm, and it is likely to increase in quantity. Sugar cane is also grown in Louisiana at the lower end of the Mississippi delta, but the frost sometimes injures it, and this industry has not grown as the other Cotton Belt industries have. We shall read more about sugar later. (Secs. 382, 383.) At various places in the southern part of the Cotton Belt where the soil is sandy, early vegeta bles are grown for the northern market. This sec tion supplies the North Central States, just as Florida supplies the North eastern States, but it does not take very much land to grow all the early vege tables that are required.
40. Peaches. — G eo rgi a has an important fruit in dustry. In July she sends to northern mar kets hundreds of carloads of peaches. In August the same varieties of peaches are being shipped from the Potomac Valley; in early September, from western New York.
41. The is fortunate that many crops will grow in the Cotton Belt, for the cotton farmers have had a great trouble of late, caused by an insect called the cotton-boll weevil. These hungry little beetles eat their way through the unripe bolls, spoiling the cotton. They came across the Rio Grande from Mexico in 1892. Each year they have pushed their way farther and farther through the Cotton Belt, going twenty-five or fifty miles a year, injuring the cotton crops as they go. Men have not been able to stop them. Almost all that can be done is to grow cotton that ripens early.
Before'the weevil came, many farmers had grown nothing but cotton, which they sold to pay for everything they used, even for the corn and hay for the mules. Cotton is such a good crop to sell! After the boll weevil came, farmers had to raise other things, thus the insect made the people change their farming by growing different crops.
42. The new, or diversified, farming.— One of the crops new to many farmers is the peanut, a plant that looks like clover and ripens its nut pods under ground. Some times the farmers harvest them and send them to market. Sometimes they let the pigs run in the field and root up the peanuts and eat them. This kind of har vesting is very cheap. Peanuts are rich food and fatten pigs very well.
Another wonderful crop is the velvet bean. One velvet bean vine will sometimes cover a whole square rod of cornfield and climb to the top of every cornstalk, produc ing great quantities of leaves and beans, which pigs and cattle come and eat along with the corn. The peanuts are often grown in between the corn rows. So are several kinds of beans called cowpeas. All are eaten by pigs, and sometimes by cattle, right where they grow. This method of harvesting is called "hogging down," or "feeding down" crops. The practice has increased rapidly, so that towns which once sold cotton only, and bought their pork, are now sending whole trainloads of hogs and cattle to the markets. The raising of many crops on one farm is called diversified farming.
43. and beans belong to a wonderful plant family called legumes. On their roots, queer lumps are found. These lumps are colonies of little plants called bacteria. The bacteria on the roots of the legumes have the very useful trick of taking nitrogen from the air and letting the plant get it through the roots. Nitrogen is neces sary to the bodies of animals andplants. People get nitrogen c hie fly from milk, cheese, eggs, nuts, beans, peas, and meat, and to a lesser extent f r o m bread. The cow that gives us nitro gen in her milk or in beef gets it from the plants which she eats. When there is not as much nitrogen in the soil as plants need to grow well, we say that the land is poor and needs nitrogenous fertil izer. We can get it in commercial fertilizer, which is costly, or wecan plant legumes, which have tiny nitrogen factories on their roots. Phosphate and potash are two other foods needed by plants. These must be bought, but they are not as expensive as nitrogen.