Answer:The Great Plains is an agricultural factory of immense proportions. Between the yellow canola fields of Canada's Parkland Belt and the sheep and goat country of Texas's Edwards Plateau, more than 2,000 miles to the south, lie a succession of agricultural regions that collectively produce dozens of food and fiber products. The most important Great Plains crop is wheat. Although the United States and Canada together produce slightly less wheat than China (the world's leading wheat grower), the two North American countries account for more than half of the world's wheat exports. Barley, canola, corn, cotton, sorghum, and soybeans grown in the Great Plains also reach markets around the world.
Agriculture has long been the life force of the Great Plains economy. Although manufacturing employs more people than agriculture in some parts of the Great Plains today, many urban industries rely on the region's farms and ranches for the raw materials they process. One has to look back several thousand years, to a time when plains inhabitants were mainly nomadic hunters, to find an era when agriculture did not figure prominently in the region's pattern of human occupation. Some Native North American groups depended on agriculture as much as the European Americans who displaced them.
