The height of the harvest season is at the end of July.

In the autumn, after the wheat has been harvested, the straw is burned and
the land is ploughed. In the following April when the soil is dry enough
to harrow, the seeds, after being carefully selected and thoroughly
cleaned, are planted. For the harvesting a great deal of new machinery is
purchased every year. One of these huge machines can cut and stack in one
day the grain from a hundred acres of land. Then the grain is threshed at
once in the field, before the rain can do it harm.

[Illustration: Grain-Elevators at Buffalo.]

Through the spout of the thresher the grain falls into the box wagon,
which carries it to the grain-elevator, or building for storing grain.
Here it remains until it is loaded automatically into the cars, which take
it to the great elevator centres. The wheat is not touched by hands from
the time it passes into the thresher until it reaches private kitchens in
the form of flour.

The great elevator centres are Duluth, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Chicago, and
Buffalo. Some elevators in these centres can store as much as a million or
more bushels each. They are built of steel and equipped with steam-power
or electricity. The wheat is taken from grain-laden vessels or cars,
carried up into the elevator, and deposited in various bins, according to
its grade. On the opposite side of the elevator the wheat is reloaded into
cars or canal-boats.

In 1914 the United States produced nine hundred and thirty million
bushels, or between one-fourth and one-fifth of all the wheat produced in
the world.

CATTLE-RAISING

The third great industry is that of cattle-raising. To find the ranches we
will go a little farther west, perhaps to Kansas. A wide belt stretching
westward from the one-hundredth meridian to the foot-hills of the Rocky
Mountains is arid land. It includes parts of Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, the
Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. Although the rainfall here is
mostly too light to grow corn and wheat without irrigation, these dry
plains have sufficient growth to support great herds of sheep and cattle,
and supply us with a large part of our beef. Cattle by the hundred
thousand feed on these vast unfenced regions.

On the great ranches of this belt, which, we are told, are fast
disappearing, there are two important round-ups of the cattle every year.
Between times they roam free over vast areas of land. In the spring they
are drive