The Grapes of Wrath #14

Corn and crops were a very improtant thing back in the 1930's. It was needed to feed the farmers families and to raise money for the families. It has always been around. Without the Indians, we would not have corn. It was a good thing they were nice and taught us about corn and how to plant it and take care of it. The Joad family has a cornfield on their farm. They harvest and plant it by hand and horse. This was a time when the tractor was coming around. The invention of the car helped the rise of the tractor. I think it did because we learned the type of engineering that is needed to become a part of the tractors. The tractors can harvest and take care of the corn much faster than a human or a horse can. Tractor were a great invention because they speed up the process of farming. They were also a bad thing around this time period because the farmers could not afford them. This is what happened to the Joad family. They could not afford to buy a tractor so they could not harvest enough corn to keep up with society and the bank was taking their land and they had to move. Tractors are very expensive so only the big farm companies could be able to afford the tractors and this is why the Joad family went to California. In California, they picked peaches and cotton. Picking peaches would be hard for a tractor to do because the peaches are so sensitive and they would bruise easily, unless the machine was gentle. There is now tractors that can pick the cotton so the Joad family got lucky enough to be able to hand pick the cotton. It was a good thing there was no tractors because the Joads would have no jobs. The problem the Joad family had was that every other family thought they would be the only ones going to California and all the harvests were picked very fast and there was no more work to do.