CHAPTER XVIII 



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^WHE overshadowing importance of the United 

 111 States in corn production tends to obscure 

 ^^ the fact that the crop is grown in all quarters 

 of the earth, and is an important crop and 

 food resource in some part of each of the world's 

 great continents. It is the cereal, food of a vast pop- 

 ulation in the northern provinces of China, where 

 famine stalks in the train of a crop failure; it is 

 a staff of life in northern Italy and to a less extent 

 in the valleys of the lower Danube ; its green blades 

 and golden tassels wave along the banks of the historic 

 Nile, and it is having its part in the modern regenera- 

 tion of the land of Joseph and Pharaoh. It is at home in 

 the rich alluvial plains of the Rio de la Plata, and is 

 the chosen food of the native sheep and cattle herders 

 of northern Argentina, while in the great island con- 

 tinent of Australia it holds a small but not insignificant 

 place in agricultural development. 



For a series of years the contribution of the United 

 States amounts to approximately seventy-five per cent 

 of the recorded crop of the world, a proportion which 

 during the past ten years has increased, rather than 

 diminished, in spite of the fact that in some foreign 

 countries the same period shows an increasing impor- 

 tance of the crop that almost indicates a revolution in 

 agricultural practice. In 1893 the United States de- 

 partment of agriculture compiled a statement showing 

 the corn crop in all countries of the world for which 

 data were regularly available, making an average for 

 what was practically the ten years preceding 1890 of 

 2,003,074,144 bushels, of which the United States fur- 



