For the past two weeks I have been travelling through lands that produce ninety per cent. of Canada’s most valuable asset—wheat. The Dominion is the second greatest wheat country in the world, ranking next to the United States. It is the granary of the British Empire, raising annually twice as much wheat as Australia and fifty million bushels more than India. The wheat crop is increasing and Canada may some day lead the world in its production. These prairies contain what is probably the most extensive unbroken area of grain land on earth. In fact, so much wheat is planted in some regions that it forms an almost continuous field reaching for hundreds of miles. The soil is a rich black loam that produces easily twenty bushels to an acre, and often forty and fifty.
The Canadian wheat belt extends from the Red River valley of Manitoba to the foothills of the Rockies, and from Minnesota and North Dakota northward for a distance greater than from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. New wheat lands are constantly being opened, and large crops are now grown in the Peace River country, three hundred miles north of Edmonton.
A man who is an authority on wheat raising tells me that the possible acreage in the Canadian West is enormous. Says he:
“We have something like three hundred and twenty thousand square miles of wheat lands. Divide this in two, setting half aside for poor soil and mixed farming, and there is left more than one hundred-thousand square miles. In round numbers, it is one hundred million acres, and the probability is that it can raise an average of twenty-five bushels to the acre. This gives us a possible crop of twenty-five hundred million bushels, which is more than three times as much as the United States produces in a year. I do not say that Canada will soon reach that figure, but her wheat yield will steadily increase, and it will not be long before it will equal yours.
“We were producing grain near Winnipeg long before your Western states existed. Wheat was raised in Manitoba by Lord Selkirk’s colony as far back as 1812. The settlers came in through Hudson Bay and worked their way down to the prairie. They were so far from the markets that there was no demand outside their own wants, and it was only when the United States had developed its West that we began to farm in earnest. Even then we had to wait for the railroads, which were first built through early in the 80’s.”
More than half the total wheat crop of the Dominion is raised in Saskatchewan, and still only one fifth of the fifty-eight million acres of arable land in that province is under cultivation. Indeed, wheat here is what coals are to Newcastle or diamonds to Kimberley. This applies to quality as well as quantity, for at a recent International Grain and Hay Show held at Chicago a farmer from Saskatchewan carried off the first prize for the best wheat grown on the North American continent.
Wheat is to Saskatchewan what coals are to Newcastle. With only one fifth of its arable land being farmed, the province raises more than half the total crop of the Dominion.
