Category: agriculture

Posted on

Weather Markets: A Business Case for Environmental History

Originally posted on The Otter ~ La loutre, May 17, 2017

When Monsanto spent $1 billion in 2013 to purchase Climate Corporation, its climate data, and its algorithms for using machine learning to predict weather, everyone from farmers and insurance companies to technologists and The New Yorker concluded that agri-business believed the climate science consensus: climate change is real and its introduces real risks to business. One century earlier, another major Western agri-business (Archer-Daniels-Midland or ADM) produced their own cutting-edge weather and crop forecasts, mainly in an effort to reduce the risk of what it called “weather markets.” By investing in environmental knowledge production, these companies revealed how they understood both local environments and international climate sciences.

Figure 1: Image: Weather factory? ADM Mill in Minneapolis, c1920. Photo: Minnesota Historical Society, MH5.9 MP3.1A
Figure 1: Image: Weather factory? ADM Mill in Minneapolis, c1920. Photo: Minnesota Historical Society, MH5.9 MP3.1A

Business signals its knowledge about the environment at many scales, from local family farms to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. When Reagan-era Secretary of State, George P. Shultz, and Climate Leadership Council president, Ted Halstead, recently advanced what they call The Business Case for the Paris Climate Accord, their message was simple. Since top US businesses support the Paris climate agreement, Donald Trump should reject any claims that climate change is a hoax and he should remain at the table in Paris. They argued that he should use it to advance his global diplomatic priorities, dismantle the Obama administration’s climate regulations, and “help reduce future business risks associated with the changing climate.” Conspicuously absent from this agenda are any of the ethical and other traditional reasons for stopping runaway climate change and mitigating the harmful effects it will have on humans and the non-human environment.

And that is, of course, the point. This New York Times op-ed is part of the journal’s pivot toward legitimizing climate change perspectives from outside the broad consensus of climate scientists. The editorial board now favors conservative voices on climate like the Climate Leadership Council precisely because “it is not made up of the usual environmentalists.” Clearly, progressives support a fair consideration of multiple perspectives, and this should include different political leanings, but one troubling new approach to truth in 2017 seems to argue that scientists and other expert voices should get no more attention than anyone else’s. Unless, that is, they have popular appeal. The Times defended hiring Bret Stephens, a pariah among climatologists, partly because “millions of people … agree with him on a range of issues.”

When a group presents a “business case for [insert environmental issue here],” they are arguing that if business approves of said environmental position then the market approves, and if the market approves then the consumer approves. And the customer is always right, amiright? Joking aside, this remains one of the great questions of our time. What is the role and responsibility of business in sustainability? Some put it in the back seat, and others argue that when the interests of capitalism and environmentalism align there could be no greater consensus. This appears to be the position of the New York Times, which isn’t exactly a populist rag. The chief exception to the anti-expert policy is the chief herself – the CEO. In November 2016, US voters made a CEO the Chief-in-Chief, and now they wait to see what business will do with the Paris accord.[1]

One group that tends to avoid the business case is our own tribe of environmental historians. As a field that cares very much about the environment we are good at talking to business, but we must also learn from organization and contribute meaningful analysis of it. This is essential considering we spend so much of our time describing how human organizations (usually private enterprise) interact with the non-human environment. Conversely, business historians are often guilty of ignoring the non-human environment and human attitudes toward it. However, interdisciplinary bridges (ecotones?) have been developing between these fields, beginning with an article by Christine Meisner Rosen twenty years ago. In 1999, Rosen and Christopher Sellers edited a special issue on the environment in the Business History Review, a journal whose stated interest now includes exploring “the relation of businesses to political regimes and to the environment.”

I think this leaves us with exciting opportunities and with our work cut out for us. Environmental historians seem increasingly interested in the relationships between business and the environment in articles in Environmental History, Environment and History, and other journals. For example, Rosen reiterated her call in Environmental History in 2005, and Sam White’s 2011 excellent study of “Capitalist Pigs” argued that “we need to study the history of pigs themselves as well as the history of capitalism.”[2] Recent books and edited collections have also set out to examine the issue, including the new Histories of Capitalism and the Environment Series, edited by Bart Elmore. In his own monograph, Citizen Coke, Elmore shows how business interacted with natural resources, or in the case of Coca-Cola how they pioneered the outsourcing of those interactions to other companies. In Green Capitalism? Hartmut Berghoff and Adam Rome bring together thirteen essays on twentieth-century business that attempt to answer the question: can capitalism be green – or at least greener?

Canadians will note that most of these explicit connections between business and nature have been made in the context of urban environmental history, although some examples in northern forestry, mining, and hydroelectricity bring the business approach beyond the metropolis and into the farm and resource frontiers.[3] Recent pioneering work on mining includes Liza Piper’s work on hard rock mining in Canada’s Northwestern lakes and Jessica van Horssen’s work on Asbestos, Quebec.[4] More non-urban approaches are appearing in a new special issue of Business History edited by Andrew Smith and Kirsten Greer.[5] Canadian historians will be interested in the recently published articles on environmental knowledge in the Hudson’s Bay Company records, the Ontario cheese industry, and Alcan in Greenland. All of these studies consider ways that organizations tried to understand and manage the natural world.

The business case for environmental history argues that nature looks differently when we examine it with company records and within the context of the firm. My study of the economy of knowledge in agri-business, focuses on Archer-Daniels-Midland Linseed Company (ADM), a notoriously secretive company that started in Minneapolis and has since become one of the big five multinational firms in the agrifood sector.

The history of ADM’s response to price volatility, supply chain problems, and trade policies tells us about the way businesses understand climatology and develop environmental knowledge. Like Monsanto and the Climate Leadership Council, they were predominantly concerned with risk mitigation. But where there was risk there was profit, and the linseed oil business included some of the leading names in the chemical sector, including Lyman Brothers in Montreal, the Rockefellars’ American Linseed Oil, Sherwin Williams, and Spencer Kellogg and Sons.

As a relative newcomer, ADM found a niche by providing crop and other environmental information to the trade (Figure 2). Linseed oil companies bought flax seed and flax seed futures in a massive grassland frontier (the Northern Great Plains, the Canadian Prairies, and the Argentine Pampas) with limited knowledge of those regions’ agroecosystems and even less about their climates. Crop knowledge was extensive and growing in the late nineteenth century, but climate knowledge was limited and retreating, because of underfunding and spurious theories about solar radiation. Meteorological forecasts were only good for 48 hours, and although Farmer’s Almanacs were very popular, their forecasting methods were secretive and studies have shown that they were really no more accurate than a coin toss.

Figure 2: Archer-Daniels-Midland circulars presenting crop data (percent of extant circulars)
Figure 2: Archer-Daniels-Midland circulars presenting crop data (percent of extant circulars)

ADM realized that in the period between sowing and harvesting, the price of flax was “a weather market.” But their records show that businesses in the grain and oilseed sector created extensive knowledge networks to gather crop and some climate information in almost real time. Unlike the meteorological offices or the almanacs, ADM, was aiming for the respect of a much smaller business circle, and they therefore maximized data and minimized predictions. They mentioned US weather in about half of their circulars (less for other countries) and they predicted weather in very few of those cases (Figure 3). They were more bullish with crop forecasts, but the circulars show that they rarely reported weather forecasts. The weather that they did report was current conditions, and it was mainly in regards to the Northern Great Plains crop during the critical maturing and harvest months (June–September).

Figure 3: Archer-Daniels-Midland circulars presenting climate data (percent of extant circulars)
Figure 3: Archer-Daniels-Midland circulars presenting climate data (percent of extant circulars)

As my longer article on ADM’s response to “weather markets” outlines, the company was deeply invested in place and its business decisions were shaped in part by its longer commitment to the Northern Great Plains. Its larger role in the knowledge economy was influenced by its position on crop and climate science; the company distrusted government crop forecasts and disregarded meteorological forecasts. ADM’s respectability depended on accuracy, but as the almanacs (and recent politicians) show, you don’t need to be accurate to be popular.

[1] At the time of writing, some important signs from the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson suggest that US intends to support the Paris agreement. Mike Blanchfield, “Freeland praises Tillerson’s work on Arctic Council climate change statement,” CBC News, May 12, 2017 <accessed May 16, 2017>

[2] Christine Meisner Rosen, “The Business-Environment Connection,” Environmental History 10 no. 1 (2005): 77-79; Sam White, “From globalized pig breeds to capitalist pigs: a study in animal cultures and evolutionary history,” Environmental History 16, no. 1 (2011): 94-120, 112.

[3] Magnus Lindmark and Ann Kristin Bergquist, “Expansion for Pollution Reduction? Environmental Adaptation of a Swedish and a Canadian Metal Smelter, 1960–2005,” Business History 50 no. 4 (2008): 530-546; Christopher Armstrong, Matthew Evenden, and Henry Vivian Nelles, The River Returns: An Environmental History of the Bow (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2009). Business History Review’s 2016 special issue on agribusiness also contains many significant rural contributions.

[4] Liza Piper, “Subterranean Bodies: Mining the Large Lakes of North-west Canada, 1921-1960,” Environment and History (2007): 155-186; Jessica van Horssen, A Town Called Asbestos: Environmental Contamination, Health, and Resilience in a Resource Community (UBC Press, 2016).

[5] The special issue stemmed out of a 2014 meeting that enjoyed support from NiCHE and some very helpful commentary by Christine Meisner Rosen and others.

Posted on

An Environmental History of our Food Systems: The last 25 Years

Presenting on The last 25 Years of Food Systems History, Dinner 2040, Phoenix (Photo by Anya Magnuson/ASU Now)
Presenting on The last 25 Years of Food Systems History, Dinner 2040, Phoenix (Photo by Anya Magnuson/ASU Now)

On a sunny day in November 2016 around one hundred food professionals gathered at an organic farm on South Mountain in Phoenix AZ to discuss the future of food. They gathered to think about “Dinner 2040,” and to imagine better pathways to a food system that we could call sustainable and just.

I joined the event to share a few thoughts about the history of food. If most people were thinking 25 years into the future, I was going to provide some context by looking 25 or 50 years into the past.

Dinner 2040 is a project of HfE Observatories, and it is led by Dr. Joan McGregor and other scholars at Arizona State University. It aims to develop a template for thinking about the values that shape food systems in a particular place, and to design “future of food” workshops and dinners that can be used in communities across North America. The five values it promotes for future food systems are:

  1. Historical/Cultural/Place-Based Practices
  2. Sustaining Environmental Integrity
  3. Health and Nutrition
  4. Food Justice and Social Justice
  5. Food Sovereignty

The workshops are meant to be live and participatory events that include a range of stakeholders, some local expertise, and of course, good food! It follows a design charrette where all of these voices come together to envision a sustainable food system and then plan the optimal pathways for attaining it. The following video by ASU Now sums up the November event.

Dinner2040: The Future of Food in Maricopa County from ASU Now on Vimeo.

For my part, I focussed on the centrality of agriculture in human history, and specifically on its changes in the modern world. Fifty years ago world agriculture was in the middle of the Green Revolution, and the advance in crop and animal technologies was one reason that people were able to eat more for less. The proportion of disposable income that families spent on food decreased dramatically in the postwar period. However, North American farmers were an aging and disappearing group. Many farms felt they had to go big or go home. Agricultural officials encouraged farmers to plow “from hedgerow to hedgerow” and indeed, to remove the hedgerows entirely. Naturally, these trends were nuanced. Thirty years ago conservation programs began to remove and protect millions of acres of marginal farmland. And twenty-five years ago, organic agriculture certification was codified at the national level in the US.

I encouraged participants to think about how we can maintain the successes of agriculture that we enjoy every day, and yet recognize that our food system is a human system and it is prone to deep inequalities and ecological disturbances. I argued that there are many environmental and business advantages to new technologies like precision agriculture and to intensive management of our farmland. But we need a diversity of humans, and I would include humanists, involved at every level. Our connection to place, to people, and to animals is one of the benefits we risk losing with Big Ag. The lessons of history warn us that we need to think carefully about the pathways we set out on before we do so. And ultimately, our one aim must be human

It was a privilege to visit Maya’s farm and to get to hear so many voices from the community, from the university, and from the food industry. It was also great to enjoy the fruits of several local chefs as they served us a stream of delicious courses in the shade of the mesquite trees.

I should add that students from my Sustainability seminar, “The History and the Future of the Anthropocene,” kindly contributed their voices and their labour to the event, serving tables, taking notes, and cleaning up afterward. Hearing their perspectives in our following class was every bit as illuminating as listening to the regular presenters.

 

Posted on

Webinar: The Security and Sustainability Forum

Historical presentation for the SSF Webinar on Integrated Land Use, June 2016
Historical presentation for the SSF Webinar on Integrated Land Use, June 2016

In June I had the pleasure of presenting a talk on “Historical Transitions in Agriculture” in a webinar at The Security and Sustainability Forum (SSF). The webinar was titled Integrated Land Use: What do individuals and societies need from landscapes, and it was organized by Dr Arianne Cease from the School of Sustainability at ASU. It featured Dr Cease, Dr. Brian Robinson of McGill University, and myself. We presented to several hundred food system and sustainability professionals with a broad range of interests and backgrounds.

The webinar was designed to address some of the main challenges in balancing food production and ecosystem services, both from historical and contemporary perspectives. We framed the problem as follows:

The ongoing extensification of agriculture is leading to historically unprecedented tradeoffs between food production and other ecosystem services such as biodiversity, non-timber forest products, landscapes aesthetics, culture, and many others. These tradeoffs are global, and sustainability scientists examine the telecoupled effects of globalization on traditional land management and societies.

This webinar discusses the difficult balance we face in feeding upwards of 9 billion while maintaining other ecosystem services, and between individual and societal benefits. Case studies include grasslands and forests in northern and southern China, farm-forest-estuary interfaces in Maritime Canada, and crop-grassland agriculture in western North America and eastern Australia.

My presentation introduced the concept of the Anthropocene as a new period in geological time, and it discussed agriculture’s role in producing that historical transition. My talk argues that human agriculture could be broadly conceived as a series of cycles between extensification and intensification within the larger trend of a transition from organic to mineral (fossil-fuel based) periods in history.

I then focus on an example from the agricultural history of Prince Edward Island from my new book Time and a Place. This province experienced settlement and the intensification of livestock husbandry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, much of the intensification occurred within the organic regime, or without the help of fossil fuels or mechanization. Farmers like Leo Farrell describe the exploitation of organic fertilizers like mussel mud, which became one way to increase production even before the transition to fossil-fuel based agriculture.

SSF webinar Integrated Land Use - Leo Farrell

The video of the webinar is available here.

It was exciting to discuss these major themes and contemporary challenges in our food systems, and I’m grateful to Ed Saltzberg and the SSF for hosting, and to Arianne and Brian for sharing the stage.

 

 

Posted on

Growing Plains: Where Energy and Agriculture Meet

I’m happy to report that I have started a new position as Postdoctoral Fellow in History at the University of Saskatchewan. From 2012-2014 I was the NiCHE Project Coordinator, and before that a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, at the University of Western Ontario. It was a great and productive experience with new websites, posters, collections, workshops, and book chapters (in HGIS methods and PEI agriculture) to show for it. Now that the NiCHE Cluster grant has concluded, its website, including The Otter ~ la loutre blog, will continue under an editorial collective.

My new fellowship is with the Sustainable Farm Systems (SFS) SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Dr. Geoffry Cunfer at the University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon.  Here I will build on the work of the Great Plains Population and Environment Project, conducting new research in agriculture on the Great Plains/Prairies and in my own case study of Prince Edward Island. My larger research program has always focused on the limits of agro-ecosystems, from flax production on the edge of the semi-arid grasslands land to abandoned farms “going spruce” in Prince Edward Island. In this vein I will be applying the new methods of socio-ecological metabolism and particularly the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) models developed by the SFS team across five research groups in Europe, Latin America, and North America.

I am an Environmental and Digital historian interested in how global commodities influenced modern agriculture and land use in Canada and the U.S. I’m particularly interested in Canada’s “other oil,” triglycerides, and how the development of new consumer goods created a global oilseed industry, first in flax and cottonseed, but later in soybeans, sunflower, corn, and Canola. The role of the European wheat market is well known in Prairie historiography, but the rapidly growing chemical sector also helped shape the Plains during the Second Industrial Revolution. My research focuses on these transnational specialty crops that appeared first in the lower Great Lakes farm region and then reemerged in the northern Great Plains and Prairies.

Two different types of energy stores on the Plains. Photo: J. MacFadyen, August 2014
Two different types of energy stores on the Plains. Photo: J. MacFadyen, August 2014

By examining the EROI of Plains agriculture, I will be building on another aspect of my recent research. My SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship focused on biomass energy and the land use patterns created by harvesting the most important perennial crop in Canada – firewood.

Flax and firewood may seem like obscure topics, but I argue that small shifts in the consumption of ordinary commodities had major ripple effects across North American landscapes. And I’ve found many like minds in Environmental History. The interest in biomass energy has caught on, if I may, as shown by the many papers on the subject at recent conferences in the field. I’ve also entered what one might even consider a concentration of historians interested in fats and oils. Here in Saskatoon – a centre for oilseed research – historians like Geoff Cunfer have written extensively about corn and cotton, Jim Clifford works on tallow in the British Empire and Patrick Chasse studies palm oil and other agricultural commodities in Guatemala. In Spain, Juan Infante and others from the Andalusian branch of the SFS team, are experts on the history of olive oil in Mediterranean agriculture.

These are just a few of the reasons I’m looking forward to this new position. There’s a lot of excellent environmental history happening here at the U of S, and I hope to continue helping to build the Canadian network here and as a volunteer editor with NiCHE.

Posted on

Mapping the Rural Industrial Landscape: Flax Mills in Ontario

Most people who visit small towns in Ontario tend to think of them as sleepy villages comprised of a few nice restaurants, B&Bs, and people who live there because they enjoy the sense of community and family roots. We know that these settlements exist because they were the location of a mill seat or they were situated roughly a day’s journey by horse & wagon from the nearest urban centre. These were service towns for the farming and resource communities of Ontario before motor vehicles and paved roads made it easier to access more distant cities. The mills and taverns are now replaced by upscale restaurants and boutiques; necessary infrastructure for a growing group of “rurban” residents who want to live, or spend weekends, within a couple of hours drive from their places of work.

Contestoga, Ontario, showing village buildings and flax mill and pond.
Contestoga, Ontario, c. 1900 showing village buildings and flax mill and pond. Source: Woolwich Heritage Foundation, Waterloo Historical Society.

c. 1900, photographer Oscar Stroh stood behind the Schweitzer Hotel on King Street (now Sawmill Road), Conestogo and faced northwest to take this picture of the flax mill on Glasgow Street North.  The mill is gone but the Ebel home remains. (Waterloo Region Generations)

It might seem from these preconceptions of rural and small town Ontario that they were relatively stable and static places. Sure, some services declined and local businesses could no longer satisfy all the shoppers from the surrounding area, but generally these towns changed very slowly and the streetscape remains similar to the way it was perhaps a century ago.

Actually the shape and structure of life in these towns was far from static, and in my PhD dissertation I used the case of a relatively obscure plant to demonstrate how. Flax was used for both its fibre and seed, and in Ontario where the fibre was processed by a network of small two-room flax mills it coloured the landscape with its blue flowers and brought hundreds and even thousands of labourers to the fields and mill yards to harvest and process the crop each August. But this post is about organizing historical data for small towns where change over time should be easy to track, but isn’t.

Some time ago I tried organizing my research on the industry in these towns and compiling the owners’ names and locations in a simple database. Again, I thought it should have been easy. Flax was a small industry, it was usually dominated by a single family with multiple mills, and thanks to censuses, directories, and rural newspapers there was a pretty good run of data on the owners and outputs.  But this was much more difficult than I expected.

There was a lot of hype around Canadian flax during the American Civil War, and both the production and the number of mills grew from almost zero to dozens in a few years. But every time I found a new list of growers or millers, it was significantly different from earlier lists. Both the names of owners and the location of the mills had changed. And so I attempted to map some of these changes in a historical Geographical Information System (GIS). GIS was a lot of work to learn and although it helped demonstrate where, I needed other sources to explain why there and why then?

It turns out Ontario farmers hated the risk and labour associated with growing this plant, and so millers themselves had to produce much of their own raw material in a system that was sometimes called flax factorship. I explain that in other writings, but here I want to show that it might seem like millers hated growing flax, too. The location of mills in the late 1860s was in roughly the same part of southern Ontario as it was thirty or forty years later, and aggregate census data would tell you it was, but comparing the following two maps of detailed mill locations suggests that it wasn’t.

Ontario Flax Mills 1865-1871

Ontario Flax Mills 1897-1911

Just by uploading six different databases into this Google Maps Engine Lite app (see instructions at The Geospatial Historian) we can see that the central concentration of mills was moving westward across Ontario every year between 1865 and 1911.  This was partly about the access to raw material – flax – but also about the suitability of small town business communities for incorporating flax production into the gamut of primary and secondary industries.

Flax mills were notoriously flammable, which contributed to the risk of operating a mill and the turnover in ownership over

Burning of a Zurich flax barn, 1901. From the Collection of the Huron County Museum & Historic Gaol.
Burning of a Zurich flax barn, 1901. From the Collection of the Huron County Museum & Historic Gaol.

the years.  It also contributed to their prominent place in Charles Goad’s and other Fire Insurance Plans and in another post I will show how mapping these sources helps us reconstruct the surprisingly busy and dynamic texture of small town streetscapes.

These maps show how a variety of sources may be used for determining the location of a flax mill in any given year.  For 1865 and 1869 I used business directories, but 1871 was from the industrial schedules of the manuscript census (provided by Kris Inwood at the University of Guelph) and 1897 was from the business accounts of the largest flax miller at that time, James Livingston (available at Sir Adam Beck Archives in Baden, ON). Of course, using a variety of routinely generated sources helps identify errors and anomalies in other data. The different variables inside these datasets also help show the nuances and spatial trends within an industry like flax milling. Not only was it limited to this part of Canada and shifting slightly each year, but the blue markers show concentrations within the concentration by differentiating mills with more outputs. In 1897, the Dominion Linseed Oil mill was importing almost all of the flax seed in Ontario to make oil, paint, and varnish, but clearly the mills closest to Baden were much larger flax seed producers than the new mills in Huron County (The same kinds of trends can be presented by size of workforce or other variables.)

Flax seed from Ontario mills, 1897

Not only would the aggregate census be unhelpful for the precise location of these mills, the variation between census years was often significant. Even within two or three years there was a great deal of variation in mill location. Turning off one or two layers on each map shows the places where new mills were popping up and disappearing even between census years. The 1897 map (above) suggests one reason for this. Even though there were many small new mills opening each year in Western Ontario, there were also many small mills closing. It was an extremely competitive industry. And finally, the economic infrastructure and industrial landscape of Western Ontario was well suited to emerging new businesses like flax mills, even if they were risky ventures and prone to fire and financial disasters. Mills abounded in these towns and many mills and their sources of motive power and labour could be converted into a flax mill relatively easily. Lumber mills were particularly easy to convert to flax mills, and often proprietors of one were involved in the other.

Posted on

As a Man Sows: Spring Planting, Prices, and the Birth of Monoculture on PEI

It is now common to read statementslike “Modern industrial agriculture is a disastrous failure, as it defies practically every natural law related to food cultivation, ecological and environmental protection and stewardship, and human nutrition.” But if this is true when did it begin, and why did new settlers decide to farm in this way? On this the last day of Spring, Real Time Farming looks back on the planting and other spring activities on nineteenth century farms like John MacEachern’s.

Spring planting: Prince Edward Island Potatoes
Photo: Josh MacFadyen

The earliest farmers in Atlantic Canada raised crops and livestock by maximizing the natural productivity of salt marshes. Wetland drainage was still a human disturbance, but at least it required limited deforestation. As population and farm settlement expanded the salt marshes represented only a fraction of the necessary caloric production, and farming became much more intrusive.

Since then, the farmer’s work has been to kill off, uproot, and fence out all of the biodiversity from an acre of land, and to plant and cultivate a single crop in its place. The old family farm might seem to us a distant sentinel of a lost way of life, but they were hardly timeless and uniform. Like all institutions that manufactured goods farms were dynamic systems and businesses, too. Decisions were based on complex variables such as climate, prices and markets, the availability of labour, community growth and decline, and changes in local diets and consumer demand. As petro-chemical fertilizers and pesticides became available they began to replace locally available soil treatments such as manure and mussel mud.

A progressively complex and experimental style of farming is visible in the diary of John MacEachern, who settled a farm in Rice Point in the mid 19th century. In the cold wet spring of 1866 MacEachern planted wheat, oats, clover, potatoes and a small amount of flax seed. Other work included building fences at home and markets in Charlottetown. The mare gave birth to a foal and the sheep were sheared for their wool.

In 1879, the spring activities in Rice Point were much more diverse. The sheep produced another coat for the shearer in June, and John’s neighbours, Doug and Jane MacDonald, processed all or part of the wool. Pork was butchered for urban markets, fish were harvested from multiple locations, and MacEachern’s sons were busy with heavy work such as picking rock, hauling mussel mud and pulverising, planting, and rolling the new crops.

Spring Planting: PEI
Photo: Josh MacFadyen

The crop selection was extremely diverse and reflected an ability to experiment with different plant varieties and methods of cultivation. Simple pulverising was replaced with “cross plowing,” harrowing, and pulverising crops before and after planting. Crop diversity increased, and even the grass seed used for hay included ТО lb each of Alsac, Dutch, and Red & White i.c., as well as “some Eng Red & White and ТН bushel Timothy.” Hay was a critically important crop for farms interested in increasing their ability to carry herds of cattle and sheep safely through the winter.

Other work in 1879 included fencing, cleaning seed, and cutting and burning “bushes” along the margins of the farm. These bushes were likely self-seeding conifers from the hedgerows and suckers growing on the stumps of cleared land.

A more interesting picture of the MacEachern’s farm landscape emerges in 1879, as John begins to think of his fields according to their locations and uses. The “bushes” and “new land” were located at the back of the lot and “outside of back fence,” and presumably the “new field” was either the same space or a field nearby. The “middle field” was on the water side of the house and had recently been lea, or pasture, and it was being pulverised and seeded to grass again in 1879.

Grass and oats fed the animals on this busy farm, and animals were essential for producing the potatoes, firewood, pork, and wool necessary to keep the MacEachern’s engaged in urban markets. Trips to “Town” were an important part of life in both the 1860s and 1870s, and the farmers made the journey both as producers and consumers. The city was the nexus for information and trade, and the most visible trend in the farm’s development was the increasing complexity of its market relationships. As MacEachern’s children came of age and became more available for farm labour, the extent of clearing, the complexity of cultivation, and the range of marketable products increased in turn.

Rice Point, PEI

May 1866

9, I went to Town for clover seed. Heavy rain.

14, I sowed wheat, five bushels

15 sowed 4 bushels of oats

16 sowed clover seed, 10 lb in 4 acres. Sowed 3.5 bushels oats on the upper turn hill and 2 lb red & white clover seed.

17. Rain showers and cold. This day 36 years ago we landed in Ch-Town the woods were green, no leaves yet. Dry now a week.

18 Sowing oats in lay land in swamp field at night mare foaled, 4 days less than a year.

19, Raining. Good fishing last week at Canoe Cove, slack at Nine Mile Creek.

24, Fine. Showry & finished sowing oats in swamp field, 15.5 bushels in 4.5 acres

25, Fine, Sheared the sheep & planted potatoes

26, Doug to mill with wheat

29 In the morning rain cleared up, I walked to ferry , to Town to Mr C W Rights

30, Overcast and raining, we planted potatoes

31 Fair, we planting potatoes, raw and cold this month.

June 1866

1, Fine, Doug and I to Town

3, Sab. Meeting in Canoe Cove

4, Sunny, the woods scarcely in leaf till this month

5, Rainy, we trucking poles to shore fence, sowed flax seed yesterday 1.5 pecks in the 1/8 of an acre

6, gloomy but mild, putting up shore fence

7, Telegraph dispatch from Canada on Sat eve last that Fenians from the Yankee’s side had encamped there…

Rice Point, PEI

May 1879

1 Thunder and a shower

2, Raw, I to Town by (Ftr, Ltr, Wr?) put note in bank, sent a letter to Cousin McFlet. & remins.

3, Warm, finished pulverising two ridges new land left in the fall

5 morning red, rain after breakfast boys went to haul mussel mud

6, foggy, Doug to Town R Ts, Potatoes 45 cents, I sifting wheat

7, misty, D & L hauling mud, Neil pulverising lea

8, I sowing wheat, 10.5 bushels below R.W.

9, Sowing Canadian clover, Alsac, Tim (Boston) on West side

10, I to Town for Eng. Clover & Alsac at Beer Brothers & Tim. & White to at Sellar’s. In the evening sowed Do in wheat, East side of field

13, I & Ln to Town, I across West River to J.W. Crosby’s

14, Hot, Neil finished planting Goodriches & Blue in lea land, middle field, below house, 4.5 acres.

15, Windy, Doug at field NW of house, oats 42 bu in 9.5-10 acres. Part pulverised before, and part after sowing.

16, I to Town paid Conr Bk by Cash from Cn day.

17, S. To W. Cloudy, N hauling potatoes & Lauchlin rolling oat field.

18, Sab. Minister Goodwill in C. C. Church.

19, Misty. 49 yeares today since we landed in Ch-Town out of the Brig “€œCorsair of Greenock,”€ passage about 45 days from port to port, the trees here were in full leaf, not so very early since.

20, Rained some last night. N.E. Misty, Neil plowing W Brookfield. E Side Doug sowed on Sat 13 Bushels. Evening, Minister in T. House, Text Galations 6: 7-10, an excellent sermon.

21 hauling stones off, near new land. Evening a heavy shower. Minister to Rocky Pt. Woods turning green now.

22 N. Cold. Sowed near back field, about 11 bushels. Evening cold and windy. Froze.

23 Ice on water at well. Doug & Christy to Town, took carcass of pork. I sowed near new field. Oats. Neil and Ln carting off stones. P. Aunt Julia came through woods.

24, NE. Blowy and cold, harrowing couch in lower W. Field for potatoes. Evening, Ln to Lobster Factory.

26, I sowing grass seeds in near Glenfield (Alsac ТО lb, Red & White i.c., Dutch ТО, some Eng red & White and ТН bushel Tim.). Rained PM fair, Neil at couch pulverizing, Doug harrowing grass seed.

27 AM W. Windy and cold and for some days past, very backward for vegetation, stormy for fishing, a thin skim of ice early

28 W. Windy, N&D finished cross plowing for potatoes, lower W field, dry. I burning trimmed bushes outside of back fence.

29 Hot & dry, PM rolling oats in new land & c.

30 AM calm, read Ezek Ch 16, Doug & Neil carting manure to lower W. Field, PM windy, much smoke from W. Dry.

31, W. Breezy & dry for some time, John McRae here helping to fill manure, day smoky & dry, hauled over 50 carts to K.

June 1879

1, Sab. Dry. Douglas the Bible C. Agent in Mg.

2, rained heavy before and after day break, much needed for crop & grass, cleared, D&N hauling M. Still from yard.

3, NE overcast, sent a letter to brother Neil in Buctouche h & one to Chas. Widow in Fredericton NB, we spreading manure for potatoes

4, AM some rain we began planting potatoes in lower W. Fields, some Pern on E. Then ten bushels Pr. Acre afterwards.  Perusi & a drill or two Comptons, and a few Brooks, and some Scotch Victorias in two places, and 8 bushels rose potatoes.

5, at potatoes

6, at potatoes

7, a gale. We finished planting as above

8, Sab. A hail shower at day break, day cool

10, hot, Doug & Jane McDonald shearing our sheep, 36 sheep 14 lambs, 3 not altered.

11, J. McDonald washing wool

12, SE, Neil hauling poles across the brook for pasture. I levelling road, Doug at Donald’s at mud frolick

13, … heard that Lowther was writted for Oct. Court expences

Posted on

Mud Isle: Mussel Mud Digging on PEI

This morning I wrote an article for NiCHE Canada’s blog on the use of mussel mud fertilizer. The extraction and spreading of mussel mud on Prince Edward Island’s frozen fields was a winter activity recorded by all of the 19th century contributors to Real Time Farming. I argued that PEI farmers improved food security and the productivity of mixed farming through the innovative use of mussel mud, a local, organic fertilizer extracted from estuaries. However, mud digging quickly became unsustainable as commercial and Provincial outfits exhausted the mud in several rivers and destroyed some of the world’s best oyster habitats. Farmers clashed with fishermen over rights to shell beds, and Federal officials ultimately encouraged farmers to adopt chemical fertilizers.

In this Real Time Farming post I have collected the mud-digging updates of the farmers, mapped some of their journeys from estuaries to upland fields, and shown how farmers adapted to new work patterns and a new resource. Farmers like the Andersons and the MacEacherns began to rely more heavily on nearby sea manure in this period, whereas farmers like Roderick Munn bought completely new farms in part, it seems, for their access to mussel mud.

York Point

Robert Harris Mussel Mud Digging, Undated, Source: Confederation Centre Art Gallery

In the winter of 1866, Francis Bain mentioned only that he was “at work on the ice,” but he did not explain exactly what he was doing. It is quite possible that he was digging some sort of sea manure for fertilizing his farmland in spring. The West (Eliot) River and North River were the most important mud digging locations in Prince Edward Island, and Bain would have been very familiar with the sight of dozens of sleighs crossing the ice to haul the rich fertilizer to their fields. Bain’s prolific journals rarely indicated who he was with or what they were doing; his focus was on wildlife. But by 1886, we know that Bain brought samples of mussel mud to a farm exhibit, and he described the natural history of mussel mud for readers of the Prince Edward Island Agriculturalist (March 11, 1886):

Every lowly tribe of the deep has brought its tribute of the store-house of manurial wealth. Oysters, mussels, quahogs, clams, the showy valved petracola and the ebony littorina, the delicate cuminia and the great rugged spired urosalpinx, corraline and starfish, sponge and protozoa lived on and were entombed in its mass, while a thousand harvests of algae added their varied foliage to swell its riches.

Rice Point

The journals of John MacEachern are a useful indicator of the shift in PEI agricultural history in the 1860s and 1870s, a shift that occurred as farmers realized the benefit of applying mussel mud to hay fields. High acidity in the soil caused a shortage in food and fodder, and Island farmers began to spread calcareous mussel mud in the period as a solution. In 1866, the winter months were quiet in Rice Point, and the MacEachern family hauled firewood across the ice for consumers in Charlottetown. By 1879, a new activity had made the winter months busier than ever. MacEachern was near the end of his life at this point, and it appears that he did not go with his sons to the mud diggers.

Continue reading “Mud Isle: Mussel Mud Digging on PEI”

Posted on

Prince Edward Island Beaches and Bain’s “Old Friends” Released from Winter’s Ice, 1866

Image
Francis Bain sketch of PEI shells, Nov 3, 1878.
Source: PARO, Image No. 4.2353.92

On this day in nineteenth century Prince Edward Island, the farm landscape is only just beginning to emerge from beneath the ice and snow. The shores of York Point, at the confluence of the North and West (Eliot) Rivers at visible for the first time this spring, and the ice sheets break away from the shore and move seaward with great flair — or so it appears in the journals of farmer-naturalist Francis Bain. Bain takes a walk along the shore and is reunited with his “old friends the shell-fish and sea-weeds.”  He frequently sketches fauna such as these pliactula, perri-winkle, natica, turris, and calyptra drawn in 1878.

In Rice Point, farmers like John MacEachern observe simply that the “Ice [is] off, and a boat crossed the ferry yesterday.” The movement of the ice began on 2 April with “ice drifting off again,” but rather than watching at the shore, this farmer was cutting poles for his spring fencing, following the ferry passage to Charlottetown, and celebrating the life of a neighbour, “old Mrs Bell, Nine Mile Creek” who “died aged about 90.”

These two accounts from 1866, show two different perspectives of rural society and environment. Bain ignores all but the natural world even though he had been at work on the ice days before, and MacEachern focuses on work, community, and transportation.  Yet they are connected, physically and emotionally, by the same seam of ice.  They respect its power and study its movements together, knowing that it will soon uncover a warmer world of natural beauty and resources.

York Point, Prince Edward Island, 1866

“April 3,  The body of ice in the harbour, agitated by the heavy north wind and full tide, broke loose from its mooring and swung down to the entrance.  The broad reach of amethyste-blue water, gleaming with brilliant coruscations of light, and streaked with white lines of fome, look peculiarly striking and refreshing as an earnest of the onward march of approaching summer.  Flocks of wild geese dot the chrystal borders of these beautiful lakes and repose quietly in the genial sunlight or dapple for their weedy meal in the clear bosom of the newly awakened waves.

This afternoon the ice broke off from our shore of the Elliot and drifted into the channel which was previously thawed open. In the evening I went down to the sandy beech [sic] thus suddenly exposed, to enjoy a walk among my old friends the shell-fish and sea-weeds.  As I passed over the sive like patches of fine sand perforated by the pholades, but a very rare, faint squirt of water arose from the animals beneath where a shower of energetic spouts would have hailed me in the summer. I dug in the sand for some of the fish; they seemed near the surface. I sought in vain for whelks on the broad band of fine rippled sand, and also for the sandy mound of the buried natica. Here periwinkles were also very rare, and these very sluggish. Far out in the long sea-weed they were more abundant.”