100 PRINCIPLES OF RURAL ECONOMICS 



our best agriculturists did not believe that there was any future 

 for the growing of spring wheat in this country. But by the 

 new process better flour could be made from the spring wheat 

 than had ever been made from winter wheat. Contempora- 

 neously with this discovery came the opening of the great 

 spring-wheat areas of the Northwest, in Minnesota and the 

 Dakotas. The population of these* three states more than 

 doubled in the decade from 1870 to 1880. Prior to this period 

 Rochester, New York, had been the great flour-manufacturing 

 center of the country, but its position of leadership was surren- 

 dered to Minneapolis, the early metropolis of the spring-wheat 

 country, almost as soon as the roller process came into use. 



Corn growing. Among the improved articles of machinery 

 used in growing corn was the " check rower." This device 

 attached to a corn planter enabled one man to do work which 

 had formerly required two. It automatically drops the seed in 

 rows running across the field at right angles to the direction 

 in which the planter is being driven, thus planting the rows in 

 two directions and permitting of cross cultivation. In the some- 

 what drier regions west of the Missouri corn came to be planted 

 by means of the " lister," a double-moldboard plow, throwing 

 a deep furrow and planting the corn in the bottom by means 

 of an automatic seeder. Though this method of planting does 

 not permit of cross cultivation, it has certain advantages, chief 

 of which is that the deeper planting of the seed enables the crop 

 to withstand drouth somewhat more successfully than does the 

 shallower planting practiced farther east. A number of other 

 minor improvements, such as the weeder, the riding cultivator, 

 which is merely a perfection of the older horse cultivator, and 

 the two-row cultivator drawn by three horses, have combined to 

 lighten the work of the corn grower and to enable each man to 

 tend a larger crop. The bulk of the corn crop continued to be 

 harvested by hand, no satisfactory machine having been designed 



