H POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



in the United States, and the heart of the cotton belt must for all time 

 lie in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. Our corn crop is three times 

 as great as for the rest of the world combined, and, though corn is 

 widely grown both north and south, the chief corn belt naturally cen- 

 ters in the Upper Mississippi and Ohio Valleys. For example, five 

 states, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri, raise over half 

 the total for the country, or, astounding as it may seem, nearly 40 per 

 cent, of the entire world's crop. Wheat, cattle, hogs, vast quantities of 

 oats, hay, potatoes, lumber, coal and other mineral products come 

 mainly from the Mississippi Valley, each one in point of quantity 

 leading all other nations of the world, and yet no one denies that the 

 limit of productivity is far from being reached. Out of this list, cotton, 

 meat products and bread-stuffs make up a large part of our foreign 

 commerce, with half the world's mileage of railroads required to get 

 the products to the seaports. As might be expected, by far the thickest 

 railroad net is in the Mississippi Valley, yet the roads there have found 

 their facilities increasingly inadequate to handle the produce of the 

 region. " Shortage of cars " has become a familiar complaint in the 

 wheat fields of the northwest. Corn and cotton in the states along the 

 Mississippi have been kept out of the markets because of increased 

 rates on rail shipments. On every side the farmers have raised the 

 cry, " Better freight facilities," but the railroads have steadily failed 

 to meet the demand. Conditions have gone from bad to worse until 

 now the harassed producers see that their only salvation lies in the 

 development of the routes so bountifully supplied by nature, with coor- 

 dination of rail and water facilities to prevent disastrous opposition. 



It is not a case of providing merely enough to meet present needs, 

 for the growth of this vast interior storehouse still continues with 

 gigantic strides. Irrigation, dry farming, swamp drainage, and the 

 exploration of the whole world to give new crop species, are opening 

 every year areas which have heretofore produced little or nothing, while 

 crop improvement and intelligent soil management are adding millions 

 of bushels to the yield of the older regions. Marked by developments 

 unparalleled in the history of the world, there seems to be no limit to 

 the enormous capacity to produce over areas measured in tens of thou- 

 sands of square miles, areas whose crops alone determine panic or pros- 

 perity for the entire nation ; areas wherein lie the sinews of the greatest 

 and most stable world power in all history. Not England, nor Russia, 

 nor China, not any other nation or continent of the world, can equal 

 in all its territory the unbounded natural advantages of the Missis- 

 sippi Basin. Yet with each added harvest the pinch of traffic conges- 

 tion and heavy transportation charges are felt by an increasing propor- 

 tion of the population, and as long as such conditions continue the full 

 economic development of the region must be seriously hampered. 



