Economic Position of Wheat Growing. 



9 



promising aid which science in many directions, whether botanical 

 or chemical, was now beginning to offer to the farmer. 



The vast territories still available in the North-West should not 

 in any case be looked upon as a mere wheat mine to be exploited 

 and exhausted by the recurrent culture of a single cereal. The 

 successful farming of the future, here as well as elsewhere, would 

 demand more careful tillage, more scientific rotations and a watch- 

 ful consideration of the changes going on in other lands in the 

 grouping of the populations and the opening of other wheat fields 

 than their own. 



As a guide to the ascertained movements of the Canadian wheat 

 area which the local statistics so far available afforded, the sub- 

 joined illustration was offered representing the areas as recorded 

 separately in Ontario, in Manitoba, and in the North-West 

 respectively since 1889. This showed how the area had diminished 

 in the older province, where farming was becoming more mixed, 

 and how it had extended in Manitoba, and still more rapidly 

 in Saskatchewan and Alberta. 



[Professor Mavor's Paper.] 



In a Paper bringing up to date the conclusions of his Report 

 to the British Board of Trade in 1904, discussing the production 

 of wheat in the North-West of Canada (printed in full in the 

 Reports of the Association), Professor Mavor explains the changes 

 in the administrative divisions known at the earlier date as Alberta, 

 Assiniboia, and Saskatchewan, and the extension due to their 

 absorption of almost the whole of the former territory of 

 Athabasca. The surface now included in the three provinces of 

 Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta covers 357,000,000 acres 

 of land and nearly 13,000,000 acres of water — together, 

 370,000,000 acres — as against 238,000,000 acres in 1904, the addi- 

 tional 50 per cent, lying, however, beyond the region of practical 

 settlement for commercial production at the present time. The 

 experience of the later five years strongly confirms Professor 

 Mavor in his conclusions of 1904 that very great improvements in 

 the productive powers of the country, and a very considerable 

 increase in the effective population, as well as a more exclusive 

 regard to wheat cultivation would have to take place before the 

 North-West could be relied upon to produce for export to Great 

 Britain a quantity of wheat even nearly sufficient for the growing- 

 requirements of that country. This exclusive attention to wheat 

 he regards as unlikely to arise, since, even were the soil uniformly 

 suitable and the seasons absolutely reliable, the disposition of the 

 people, and their settlement in small farms, of which the owner is 

 also the cultivator, seems against such exclusive cultivation of one 



