| OCR Text |
Show 48 BASIS OF AMERICAN HISTORY [ 1900 shipped outside the county where it is grown came from the five states of Illinois, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, and Indiana. ) Wheat is in some respects of still greater importance, but in the United States has only about one- half the acreage of corn, / introduced by the earliest immigrants, it was at first cultivated throughout the East, and was carried forward with the advance of colonization. ; It is distinctly a northern crop, nowhere flourishing south of the glaciated belt, its centre of distribution lying in the West. In 1902 the total crop in the United States was over six hundred and seventy million bushels, and in North America seven hundred and eighty million, a decrease of sixty- six million from the figures for 1901.1 Of this Minnesota supplied the largest share, over ten per cent, of the whole; North Dakota nearly sixty- three million, Missouri over fifty- six million, Manitoba nearly fifty- five million, and Nebraska fifty- three million bushels. Kansas and South Dakota yielded each between forty and fifty million, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois between thirty and forty million bushels. The best yield per acre, twenty- nine and one- tenth bushels, was in Washington, with something over a million acres in cultivation, and other high averages are made by states with a comparatively small total output. In the year chosen for comparison the continent produced almost exactly one- quarter of the U. S. Dept. Agric, Year- Book, 190a, p. 268. - |
