9.14 Rural Canada in an Urban Century
Daniel Samson, Department of History, Brock University
At the time of Confederation, Canada was a rural country. By the middle of the 20th century, the majority of the country was urban. Today, it’s mostly urban. How did that happen? And what does that mean for our understanding of the country’s history? The most obvious answer is that the late 19th-century emergence of industrial capitalism meant that waged work was available in the towns and cities of the country, and that the country’s farms were able to feed this increasingly urban population.
Why were farmers able to feed so many more people? The most important change was the development of gas-powered engines and machinery. Farm mechanization had begun in Canada in the early 19th century, but increased dramatically in the years just before and after World War I. Productivity improved because mechanization meant that fewer people could do more labour on ever-larger farms. In the 1830s, most wheat was harvested by hand, greatly limiting the size of farms. Seventy years later, harvesting, winnowing, and threshing machines meant that 100s of acres, rather than 10s of acres, could be harvested and partially processed quickly and with far fewer human labourers. Many people, however, feared that all that productivity came at a cost. Rural depopulation also meant that rural communities shrank. Increased productivity, too, owed much to increased use of pesticides, adding to costs and multiplying the environmental consequences of agriculture. Mechanization, pesticide purchases, and other increasingly capital intensive techniques meant that steadily fewer families could sustain the higher costs of industrial agriculture.
Many of those who were moving to the city did so because farming had become untenable. Often, the owners of small farms sold out to larger producers. Indeed, farms continue to grow larger to this day. While the number of farms peaked in the 1930s, total farm acreage has actually increased over the course of the 20th century. The average size of a farm in Saskatchewan in 1914 was about 200 acres; by 1936, it had doubled to 400; and by 1956, had reached over 600 acres per farm. Today, that number is around 1,700 acres. By the early postwar period, farms could no longer really be considered “family farms”; they were businesses — larger in scale, capital intensive, and demanding stable access to markets.
Improvements in transportation also encouraged the growth of farms. Larger producers found ready markets for their products, and the increased availability of trains and steamships meant that Canadian farmers and ranchers, even those far from the ocean ports of Halifax and Montreal, could get their products to markets in Britain and the Caribbean. Rail integration in the 20th century opened access to the United States market. The Prairies were Canada’s breadbasket, producing more than four-fifths of the country’s wheat and exporting large quantities o