Introduction | Bison Economy | Kootisaw | Fort Calgary | Ranching | Agriculture
1895-1946 | 1947-1970 | 1971-1991 | Oil & Gas | Diversification | Ethnicity | Labour | Women
Calgary & Southern Alberta
Hay farming near
Strathmore, 1929
Courtesy of the Western Irrigation District
The national policy of John A. Macdonald was built upon an agrarian vision in which the West would be populated with productive farmers who supplied the East with food and bought eastern goods. In preparation for incoming homesteaders, the government surveyed the land into townships in 1871. In the following year, it enacted the Dominion Lands Act.
Although agrarian settlement developed slowly in southern Alberta, some farmers did immigrate to the region in the late 1880s and early 1890s. A group of Mormons from the United States, who settled near Cardston during these years, were Alberta's first large group of successful farmers. However, it was the energetic immigration campaigns of Minister of the Interior Clifford Sifton that initiated massive western settlement.
Sifton's campaigns, although impressive, were aided by favourable external conditions. A growing European demand for wheat had elevated wheat prices and expanded the market. Farmers had access to better farm machinery. Researchers had developed early-maturing wheat. The American settlement frontier, moreover, was closing.
From 1896 to 1914, rural Alberta's population expanded dramatically. The rail system grew enormously, better grain handling and marketing systems developed, and technology and agrarian science advanced. Irrigation was an important element to successful farming throughout southern Alberta. In some areas, it was vital. Producing crops such as sugar beets, for example, was possible only with sufficient irrigation. During this robust period, newspapers and magazines glorified rural life as an image of purity, productivity and national prosperity. Yet, farming was not without its problems. In the midst of apparent success, many Alberta farmers were in trouble.
CPR farm near Strathmore
Courtesy of the Western
Irrigation District
From 1905 to 1930, 45 percent of homesteaders who took out claims in Alberta failed to prove up and secure title. Southern Alberta's environment was often harsh and difficult. Farmers saw unstable wheat prices and a banking system that seemed exploitative as sources of frustration. However, they reserved their most hostile feelings for the CPR and the tariff. Thousands felt exploited, and determined to change their status. They began to organise themselves and, in 1906, the Alberta Farmers Association joined with the older Territorial Grain Growers Association to form the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA).
During World War I, the price of wheat soared. Wheat production increased, with Alberta's wheat acreage doubling from 1914 to 1916. Increased prosperity, however, also increased the costs for labour, land and machinery. Most farmers used their profits for expansion, but high wartime interest rates created a dangerous situation. When the bumper crops of 1915 and 1916 were followed by a series of dry years, wheat yields fell drastically. With farmland highly mortgaged and credit overextended, the banks began to pressure for payments. In reaction, farmers turned to the UFA. The UFA had been the strength of rural society for years; in 1921, it became the province's government too.
The depression years brought new challenges to Alberta farmers. Wheat prices plunged, and net farm incomes fell from $102 million in 1928 to $5 million in 1933. Farmers stopped buying so the railway cut back on operations, further hampering agricultural sales. Severe drought created dust storms, soil erosion and a serious grasshopper infestation. Poor cultivation methods added to the problem, causing millions of acres to blow out of control. In the mid-1930s, soil drifts up to ten feet high were being cleared by the CPR's snowplows. In the eastern dry belt, farmers left the land, and entire rural communities were abandoned. Many began to think that Palliser's Triangle was, indeed, a desert unfit for cultivation. In the Chinook belt of southwestern Alberta, however, farmers and farm experts worked together to mitigate that area's difficulties and, in the process, generated some solutions to the problems of dryland farming.
World War II had a number of important consequences for Alberta agriculture, including a move to larger, yet fewer farms. The reduction in the number of farms drained rural communities. In 1951, over half of the Alberta population was urban. A decade later, the figure was over 70 percent. The depopulation of rural Alberta continued into the 1980s, by which time less than 10 percent of Alberta's workforce was employed in agriculture. In a series of events reminiscent of the 1920s and '30s, farm foreclosures rose dramatically. Nevertheless, agriculture is still the second most important activity in Alberta's economy after the oil and natural gas industry.
Although today's Calgary is nearly synonymous with the oil and natural gas industry, it once had other equally important economic links. In its initial stage of development, the cattle business ranked supreme. The city has still not entirely shed its "Cowtown" label. When the wheat economy pre-empted ranching, Calgary reflected the transition by becoming the regional headquarters for farm implement dealers and milling and grain processing plants. Its economy, tied directly to agricultural growth, depended upon rural population increase, crop productivity and favourable market conditions. With the beginning of World War I, agriculture declined, immigration ceased, and the booster predictions of continued expansion fell flat. Calgary's economy seriously lagged. Although the city depends less now on crop production and livestock for economic vitality, it remains mindful of its agrarian roots.
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