The abundance of pasturage and hay makes good dairying, and Nova Scotia is emphatically a country of mixed farming. Almost all crops suited to a temperate climate can be grown in some part of the province. But, during a recent year, of all agricultural products, hay brought most money into the farmers’ pockets; then came live stock products, potatoes, apples, oats, “garden truck,” and so in a descending scale.
FISH CURING AT GUYSBORO, NOVA SCOTIA. NOTE THE SPLIT
COD-FISH DRYING IN THE FOREGROUND.
Not only the farming can be described as “mixed” in Nova Scotia. The occupations of her people (in number somewhat under half a million) are also mixed; and though agriculture takes first place, fishing, lumbering, mining and manufacturing are of importance, all the great industries setting “new records” last year.
In fishing, Nova Scotia was long the leading province of the Dominion, but in 1912, British Columbia, with her immense catch of salmon, stepped before her. In the Atlantic province, though the lobster fishery is valuable and is to the dwellers on the sterile southern coast the chief source of ready money, the cod fishery is worth most of all, a fact quaintly recognized by the habit of the shore people of referring to a cod as “a fish,” and to all others of the finny tribe by their specific names of haddock, halibut and so forth.
The fishing hamlets consist of little whitewashed cottages dotted at random about the weather-beaten rocks, beside the fine natural harbours or little coves where the boats run in for shelter, alongside ramshackle stages where the cod are dried in the open air, and by fish-houses, often emitting the peculiarly horrible odour of over-kept “bait.”
Despite all drawbacks, there is a fascination in the jumble of boats and nets and lobster traps, whilst the fisherfolk themselves, fresh-complexioned, clear-eyed, sturdy-limbed, simple, kindly and straightforward, are a good stock one would fancy to set against the threatening degeneration of the race by the unwholesome crowding into towns. Some 30,000 men find employment, on sea and shore, in connection with the fisheries. The fishermen are generally rather poor, but the more enterprizing members of the fraternity often pass from the sailing of a fishing boat to that of a coasting vessel.
In the coast villages tiny stores, with stock small in quantity, great in variety, are plentiful, and some of the fishermen attempt to add to their incomes by farming, often in a rather haphazard, amateurish fashion. Along the shore east of Halifax horses are scarce, and in the little hay-fields even a one-horse mowing machine is an unusual sight, and it is quite common to see two men, or it may be a man and a girl, carrying the cured hay to the barn on two stout poles. In those parts the fisherfolk take little pains even to improve their own fare by growing vegetables, but the soil is discouraging. In fact, one resident of a coast village near Halifax complained, “There ain’t no soil. There’s nothing but grits!”
Some of the fishermen prosecute their craft only “inshore,” using small boats, remaining out but a few hours and fishing with hand lines as well as with trawls from the dories. These men are very dependent on the weather; but gasoline motor boats are coming into use, enabling them to go out when it would be impossible with sailing boats. The “bank fisheries,” chiefly of cod, are carried on by schooners of about 100 tons, manned by twelve to twenty men, who go out, two by two, in dories, using trawls upon which are thousands of hooks. In the rivers, smelts, salmon, trout and eels are taken; and there are natural oyster beds, now yielding a few hundred barrels of oysters annually, which it is said, with improved management, may yield thousands. In fact, better methods may do much to make all the fisheries of Nova Scotia much more productive.
Of the forests of the province, something under one and a half million acres remain ungranted, and four or five times as much is owned by farmers and held or leased by lumber and pulp companies. As everywhere in the Dominion there has been untold loss from fires and wasteful methods, but the idea of “conservation” promises better things in future. Pine, of which there used to be large quantities, has become scarce; but spruce (of more recently discovered value) and birch, a good furniture wood, are extremely plentiful. The saw mills are generally situated on the rivers, near tide water; thus their product can be loaded directly into vessels, which carry it far and wide.