Farming in New France
It was the royal desire that New France should some day become a
powerful and prosperous agricultural colony, providing the
motherland with an acceptable addition to its food supply. To this
end large tracts of land were granted upon most liberal terms to
incoming settlers, and every effort was made to get these acres
cultivated. Encouragement and coercion were alike given a trial.
Settlers who did well were given official recognition, sometimes
even to the extent of rank in the "noblesse". On the other hand
those who left their lands uncleared were repeatedly threatened with
the revocation of their land-titles, and in some cases their
holdings were actually taken away. From the days of the earliest
settlement down to the eve of the English conquest, the officials of
both the Church and the State never ceased to use their best
endeavors in the interests of colonial agriculture.
Yet with all this official interest and encouragement agricultural
development was slow. Much of the land on both the north and the
south shores of the St. Lawrence was heavily timbered, and the work
of clearing proved tedious. It was estimated that an industrious
settler, working by himself, could clear not more than one
superficial "arpent" in a whole season. So slowly did the work make
progress, in fact, that in 1712, after fifty years of royal
paternalism, the cultivable area of New France amounted to only
150,000 "arpents", and at the close of the French dominion in 1760
it was scarcely more than twice that figure,--in other words, about
five "arpents" for each head of population.
While industry and trade, particularly the Indian trade, took the
attention and interest of a considerable portion in the population
of New France, agriculture was from first to last the vocation of
the great majority. The census of 1695 showed more than seventy-five
per cent of the people living on the farms of the colony and this
ratio was almost exactly maintained, nearly sixty years later, when
the census of 1754 was compiled. This population was scattered along
both banks of the St. Lawrence from a point well below Quebec to the
region surrounding Montreal. Most of the farms fronted on the river
so that every habitant had a few "arpents" of marshy land for hay, a
tract of cleared upland for ploughing, and an area extending to the
rear which might be turned into meadow or left uncleared to supply
him with firewood.
Wheat and maize were the great staples, although large quantities of
oats, barley, and peas were also grown. The wheat was invariably
spring-sown, and the yield averaged from eight to twelve
hundredweights per "arpent", or from ten to fourteen bushels per
acre. Most of the wheat was made into flour at the seigneurial mills
and was consumed in the colony, but shipments were also made with
fair regularity to France, to the West Indies, and for a time to
Louisbourg. In 1736 the exports of wheat amounted to nearly 100,000
bushels, and in the year following the banner harvest of 1741 this
total was nearly doubled. The price which the habitant got for wheat
at Quebec ranged normally from two to four "livres" per
hundredweight (about thirty to sixty cents per bushel) depending
upon the harvests in the colony and the safety with which wheat
could be shipped to France, which, again, hinged upon the fact
whether France and England were at peace or at war. Indian corn was
not exported to any large extent, but many cargoes of dried peas
were sent abroad, and occasionally there were small shipments of
oats and beans.
There was also a considerable production of hemp, flax, and tobacco,
but not for export in any large quantity. The tobacco grown in the
colony was coarse and ill-flavored. It was smoked by both the
habitant and the Indian because it was cheap; but Brazilian tobacco
was greatly preferred by those who could afford to buy it, and large
quantities of this were brought in. The French Government frowned
upon tobacco-growing in New France, believing, as Colbert wrote to
Talon in 1672, that any such policy would be prejudicial to the
interests of the French colonies in the tropical zones which were
much better adapted to this branch of cultivation.
Cattle raising made substantial progress, and the King urged the
Sovereign Council to prohibit the slaughter of cattle so that the
herds might keep on growing; but the stock was not of a high
standard, but undersized, of mongrel breed, and poorly cared for.
Sheep raising, despite the brisk demand for wool, made slow headway.
Most of the wool needed in the colony had to be brought from France,
and the demand was great because so much woolen clothing was
required for winter use. The keeping of poultry was, of course,
another branch of husbandry. The habitants were fond of horses; even
the poorest managed to keep two or three, which was a wasteful
policy as there was no work for the horses to do during nearly half
the year. Fodder, however, was abundant and cost nothing, as each
habitant obtained from the flats along the river all that he could
cut and carry away. This marsh hay was not of superior quality, but
it at least served to carry the horses and stock through the winter.
The methods of agriculture were beyond question slovenly and crude.
Catalogne, the engineer whom the authorities commissioned to make an
agricultural census of the colony, ventured the opinion that, if the
fields of France were cultivated as the farms of Canada were,
three-quarters of the French people would starve. Rotation of crops
was practically unknown, and fertilization of the land was rare,
although the habitant frequently burned the stubble before putting
the plough to his fields. From time to time a part of each farm was
allowed to lie fallow, but such fallow fields were left unploughed
and soon grew so rank with weeds that the soil really got no rest at
all. All the ploughing was done in the spring, and it was not very
well done at that, for the land was ploughed in ridges which left
much waste between the furrows. Too often the seed became poor, as a
result of the habitant using seed from his own crops year after year
until it became run out. Most of the cultivated land was high and
dry and needed no artificial drainage. Even where the water lay on
the land late in the spring, however, there was rarely an attempt,
as Peter Kalm in his "Travels" remarks, to drain it off. The
habitant had patience in greater measure than industry, and he was
always ready to wait for nature to do his work. Everybody depended
for his implements largely upon his own workmanship, so that the
tools of agriculture were of poor construction. The cultivation of
even a few "arpents" required a great deal of manual drudgery. On
the other hand, the land of New France was fertile, and every one
could have plenty of it for the asking. Kalm thought it quite as
good as the average in the English colonies and far better than most
arable land in his own Scandinavia.
Why, then, did French-Canadian agriculture, despite the warm
official encouragement given to it, make such relatively meager
progress? There are several reasons for its backwardness. The long
winters, which developed in the habitant an inveterate disposition
to idleness, afford the clue to one of them. A general aversion to
unremitting manual toil was one of the colony's besetting sins.
Notwithstanding the small per capita acreage, accordingly, there was
a continual complaint that not enough labor could be had to work the
farms. Women and children were pressed into service in the busy
seasons. Yet the colony abounded in idle men, and mendicancy at one
time assumed such proportions as to require the enforcement of
stringent penalties. The authorities were partly to blame for the
development of this trait, for upon the slightest excuse they took
the habitant from his daily routine and set him to help with warlike
expeditions against the Indians and the English, or called him to
build roads or to repair the fortifications. And the lure of the fur
trade, which drew the most vigorous young men of the land off the
farms into the forest, was another obstacle to the growth of
yeomanry. Moreover, the curious and inconvenient shape of the farms,
most of them mere ribbons of land, with a narrow frontage and
disproportionate depth, handicapped all efforts to cultivate the
fields in an intelligent way. Finally, there was the general poverty
of the people. With a large family to support, for families of ten
to fifteen children were not uncommon, it was hard for the settler
to make both ends meet from the annual yield of a few "arpents",
however fertile. The habitant, therefore, took the shortest cut to
everything, getting what he could out of his land in the quickest
possible way with no reference to the ultimate improvement of the
farm itself. If he ever managed to get a little money, he was likely
to spend it at once and to become as impecunious as before. Such a
propensity did not make for progress, for poverty begets
slovenliness in all ages and among all races of men.
If anything like the industry and intelligence that was bestowed
upon agriculture in the English colonies had been applied to the St.
Lawrence valley, New France might have shipped far more wheat than
beaver skins each year to Europe. But in this respect the colony
never half realized the royal expectations. On the other hand, the
attempt to make the land a rich grain-growing colony was far from
being a flat failure. It was supporting its own population, and had
a modest amount of grain each year for export to France or to the
French West Indies. With peace it would soon have become a land of
plenty, for the traveler who passed along the great river from
Quebec to Montreal in the late autumn might see, as Kalm in his
"Travels" tells us he saw, field upon field of waving grain
extending from the shores inward as far as the eye could reach,
broken only here and there by tracts of meadow and woodland. Here
was at least the nucleus of a Golden West.
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