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Tom Monto

Wheat monoculture for export vs. “small farms well tilled”

Two main models of farming are often compared and contrasted.


Many look to wheat monoculture, wheat produced in quantities surplus to local (or even regional) needs, meant instead for export along elaborate transportation lines, for sale in foreign markets.


There is another style of farming though. The Australian author of On the Margins of the Good Earth described it thus:


"Small freehold farm of the sturdy independent yeoman, worked by the family, which it supported by its own produce of field, garden, orchard, woodlot and livestock, yielding a modest surplus from a variety of crops carefully planted and tended. A concept based upon the rich heritage of a deeply-rooted European peasantry ...


Among the innovations promoted by the non-farming agricultural pundits was a fourfold rotation of rape, wheat, pea and wheat. They criticized the farmer pioneers for failing to bother with orchards and gardens, dairy stock, swine and poultry.”


A glance at the Edmonton Bulletin in the the 1890s reveals many endorsements of mixed farming. While wheat farmers risk all on one successful crop each year, a relatively self-sufficient mixed farm produces much of the food needed by a family throughout the growing months. The Edmonton area, as the Edmonton Bulletin pointed out, is well suited to mixed farming.


The Australian author saw the wheat farmer as holding a different set of beliefs:


"The pioneer on the wheat frontier in South Australia was working within an entirely different context. He had no emotional ties to the land. His land had not been passed down to him through the generations. It had been purchased. It was not a legacy but an investment. [This perception seems to be unduly mercenary for today's farm families of Alberta. Many have had the land passed down from generation to generation. Many do want to see it passed down to the next generation.]


The author continued:

"...He farmed not as a member of an intimate, stable, localized society but as a member of a world-wide dynamic competitive society...

A generation of experience had proved that in these precarious sub-humid lands under intensive competitive conditions wheat had to be grown on each farm by the hundreds instead of mere tens of acres. Labor, not land, was the scarce factor. And a whole array of new enlarged and efficient machinery now allowed a whole new scale of agriculture.


..The railroad, the great instrument of regional specialization, was basic to it all. The day was arriving when the products of the orchard and garden and dairy could be shipped to the wheat farms instead of being grown there. And the day had arrived when the farmer at a relatively trifling cost in time or money could go to the city and partake of all the amenities of the new urban civilization. it was the first step toward healing the age-old cleavage between rural and urban life. For these farmers, wheat was the springboard for a sudden leap into a new way of life.


The frontier farmer should not escape from criticism. There was undoubtedly an excessive degree of crudeness and slovenliness on many farms. Some greater permanence of settlement and pride of ownership was certainly a theme worth promoting. Some higher standard of housing and better care of livestock was clearly desirable The absence of gardens and orchards and milk cows was justifiable only if their products were being purchased, not if their neglect meant an impoverished diet.


On industrial-age folk agriculture, the author wrote “a whole new agricultural region had been defined, its domestification initiated and a system of farming established. Some elements of that system had been brought forward intact from the older regions; most had been altered; some were completely new, but the whole complex had been worked out by the settlers themselves.” (Scientists and lecturers, model farms and agricultural colleges arrived after this.)


“The evidence confirms the South Australia frontier wheat farmer -- and his companion, the country machinist-- as uncommonly industrious, adaptable and inquisitive pioneers who rapidly developed a new and basically successful farming system to meet the peculiar challenge of new environmental and economic situations. The new seasonal rhythms of activity, new tillage techniques, new implements for clearing, cultivating and harvesting were all folk-inventions.


However, corporate railway lines were necessary for the export trade in wheat, making foreign sales of the mass agriculture possible.


(It was noted though that railways were a mixed blessing. Railways allowed the entry into the marketplace of low-priced manufactured goods (and even foods) from large plants elsewhere, swamping out local production and causing unemployment. The best time for local farmers, it was said was just as the railway was being built into an area. Work crews demanded food and the railway company needed locally-available construction materials - railway ties, etc.. Land values rose. But once settlers flooded in, the local economy became much more competitive.)


And exported wheat, like all export goods, faced uncertainty. The author noted "Among the multitude of factors that affected farming's success was the price for wheat established in a distant highly-competitive market."


Source:

On the Margins of the Good Earth, The South Australian Wheat Frontier, 1869-1884 by D.W. Meinig. Rand McNally & Company, 1962. page 115-122

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