The American Centralizer Belt

Abstract

T nHE American Centralizer Belt is one of the main subdivisions of butter manufacture in the nation. It extends north-south from North Dakota to western Oklahoma, and lies in the eastern margin of the Great Plains and in the plains-border area to its east (Fig. 1). An eastward bulge, or extension, includes much of the southern two-thirds of Iowa. Nebraska, near the center of the northsouth extent of the Centralizer Belt, is the heart of the region, and has long occupied fourth position among the states in butter manufacture (Table I). A centralizer is a very large creamery, at which the cream from wide areas is centered for manufacture into butter. A centralizer draws its raw material in the form of sour cream from an extensive area, and reaches tens and hundreds of miles for its supply; in many cases cream is shipped as much as 40() or 500 miles to centralizers. The plant is ''centered also among hundreds of small cream stations, which act as intermediaries between the farmer who supplies the sour cream and the large company that manufactures it into butter. The farmers of the plains-border area and the farmers and ranchers of the Great Plains are important producers of cream.> This little-known activity of the plains extends from North Dakota to western Oklahoma, and westward in all of the plains states into the dry lands west of the 100th meridian-in fact into the eastern portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. Cream production is a feature of all of the agricultural regions; it occurs in the Spring Wheat areas of the Dakotas and Montana, the Corn Belt portions of South Dakota and Nebraska, the Hard Winter Wheat Belt of western Kansas as well as the more diversified agricultural regions of the eastern part of the state, the Livestock Ranching areas of Wyoming and Colorado, and in the wheat regions of northwestern and western Oklahoma. Only on the south, where cotton begins to enter the scene in central Oklahoma, does the milking of cows and the sale of cream cease to be important; here the patterns of the Cotton Belt begin to hold sway. The production of cream and the manufacture of butter in the five states from North Dakota to Oklahoma--the core of the American Centralizer Belt is important enough to account annually for some 15 to 18 per cent of the butter manufacture of the United States (Table II). The proportion would be higher if the centralizer manufacture of Iowa were added; in this state the very large butter outpLt---third in the nation--is the result of the normal butter mantufacture in the northeastern dairy region of the state (part of the Tri-State Butter Region of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa) and the centralizer as well as small-creamery manufacture of southern