Ontario Agriculture Week: Wheat Mining

 Hey again history buffs, I’m Stephen here with the Backus-Page house museum, and today I wanted to take a brief detour from our chronological dive into farming in the Talbot Settlement to talk about a farming practice called “wheat mining”. 

I came across wheat mining in my research while writing the second blog post and thought a single sentence just would not do it justice. 

Though our series as a whole focuses on the Talbot Settlement, I would like to clarify that I have not found any concrete evidence that any Talbot settlers were wheat miners. This post is not pointing fingers at any farmers in particular, it is instead only to highlight one of many potential dangers facing farmers in Ontario. 

So, what is wheat mining? Well, as you might already know, managing the nutrients in soil by cycling out different kinds of crops was and is essential to maintaining a farm over a long-term period of time. For example, buckwheat was grown by settlers to prepare the soil for future wheat crops, as wheat yields would be greater after that particular plant was grown. 

Wheat mining completely ignores this aspect of farming, planting exclusively wheat for many years in a row. A farmer would plant wheat consecutively until the soil was exhausted, reaping the short-term benefits of a large wheat yield at the expense of long-term longevity.  

At first glance, wheat mining seems pretty standard, just a risky practice with the potential to capitalize off of rapidly fluctuating wheat prices. But a particularly opportunistic farmer could reap the rewards without the risk if they were willing to do it at someone else’s expense. 

To an untrained farmer, like many who would have been given land in Ontario, a field that had been used to wheat mined would be indistinguishable from regular farmland. Because of this, a farmer could wheat mine until their soil was exhausted, then sell off their land to an unsuspecting settler and repeat the process. 

Of course, wheat mining was looked down upon in the farming community, since it was a fairly low effort practice and usually came at someone else’s expense. In the 19th century, many British farmers looking for work would have moved to Ontario, especially during the northern expansion that required extra workers. 

 

Kind of sneaky eh? Tomorrow will be our last stretch of time leading into the 20th century, I just wanted to give one last example to illustrate how many difficulties farmers had to manage if they wanted to be successful in 19th century Ontario.  

References 

Guillet, Edwin C. The Pioneer Farmer and Backwoodsman: Volume Two. University of Toronto Press, 1963. 

Jones, Robert Leslie. History of agriculture in Ontario 1613-1880. University of Toronto Press, 1946.