Economic Position of Wheat Growing. 5 



I. 



on the general economic position of wheat growing 

 and the special considerations affecting the 

 north-west of canada. 



A Resume BY Major P. G. Craigie, C.B. 



In the address which opened the deliberations of the Sub-Section 

 of Agriculture (printed in full in the Transactions of the Associa- 

 tion), the Chairman invited attention to the paramount influence 

 exerted on problems of this type by the varying growth of popula- 

 tion and the relative degrees in which from time to time different 

 regions of the earth contributed to the production of wheat. 



A review of the available statistics made it plain that, although 

 some effort had been made to feed the largely augmenting popula- 

 tions of Western Europe by securing an increased yield from the 

 acreage previously employed, it was mainly from the surplus of 

 certain still exporting States of Eastern Europe, and from the 

 ample and more lately peopled areas of North and South America, 

 and in a minor degree Australia, that the inevitable deficit of bread 

 corn in this quarter of the earth's surface had to be supplied. 

 Although it was opportune and appropriate to enter at this 

 Winnipeg meeting on a careful examination of the local features 

 attending the rapid acceleration of wheat-growing in the North- 

 West, sound conclusions respecting the relative extent of the 

 future supply to be drawn from any single geographical area 

 involved an examination of world-wide problems. 



The conclusions of the statistician and economist were required, 

 as well as the advice of the scientific investigator and experi- 

 mentalist, before an answer could be given to the question whether, 

 how far, and at what rate, with profit to himself and with benefit 

 to the bread consumer across the ocean, the Canadian agriculturist 

 — in the face of the conditions now existing or likely to prevail — 

 could push the further extension of the well-nigh eight million 

 acres of wheat land which the Dominion claimed to show in 1909. 



By way of clearing the ground for this local discussion, reference 

 was made to the effect of more recent statistics in dissipating the 

 alarm which had been raised in 1898 by Sir William Crookes — 

 largely on the authority of earlier data supplied by an American 

 statistician — that the wheat-producing soil of the world, as a 

 whole, was becoming unequal to the strain put upon it by the 

 multiplication of bread-eaters ; and that a wheat famine could only 

 be averted by materially raising the world's average of wheat yield 

 per acre on the surface at present devoted to that cereal by the 

 beneficial magic of the chemist in making available a fertilising 

 supply of nitrogen sufficient to raise that average nearly 50 per 

 cent. 



