Ross Fair, Improving Upper Canada: Agricultural Societies and State Formation, 1791-1852. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2024.
Late summer in Ontario launches the season for local agricultural societies to host their annual fall fair at a community fairground. Each September, the Ontario Plowmen’s Association hosts the International Plowing Match and Rural Expo. Early November is on the rural calendar, too, for the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair is held at Toronto’s Exhibition Place, the fairground that hosts the annual Canadian National Exhibition. Each of these events derives from the nineteenth-century promotion of agricultural improvement, an activity informed by the Enlightenment ideology of improvement.
The colonial pursuit of improved agriculture spawned local agricultural societies that hosted agricultural exhibitions, often featuring a plowing match. In 1830, the Upper Canadian government legislated annual public funding for the organization and operation of an agricultural society in each district of the colony to promote agricultural improvement. Today, the Ontario Association of Agricultural Societies represents over 200 agricultural societies throughout the province, all guided by provincial legislation descended from the original act of 1830 and overseen by the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, itself a product of nineteenth-century agricultural improvers’ ambitions.
Competitors and attendees at today’s fall fairs, exhibitions, and plowing matches may never consider that what they enter for competition or what they view on display to be “agricultural improvements.” But, in fundamental ways, improvement’s promotion remains little changed from the early nineteenth century. I begin the book by discussing a motto repeated regularly during the period under study: “He that causes two blades of grass to grow where only one grew before is a benefactor of his country.” From a twenty-first century point of view this may seem a simplistic level of improvement; however, Georgian and early Victorian science applied to agriculture produced important improvements in animal breeding and husbandry, plant varieties, tillage and fertilization of soil, as well as labour-saving machinery. True, agricultural improvement in the Upper Canadian context could be as rudimentary as a farmer’s effort to grow slightly greater crop yields from soil that was recently a forest floor, but today’s agribusiness also seeks its own survival and improvement by adopting both small and large agricultural improvements to face modern challenges of climate, markets, and labour. The context may be quite different, but the aim and ideology behind it remains similar.
I explore Upper Canada’s agricultural societies to demonstrate that they were the institutional embodiment of the ideology of improvement.
While other historians have examined the origins, purpose, and meaning of exhibition culture in Canada, I explore Upper Canada’s agricultural societies to demonstrate that they were the institutional embodiment of the ideology of improvement. I argue that the agricultural improvers who established and led agricultural societies were important agents of colonial state formation.
The book first examines several failed attempts to create a single agricultural society for the province between 1791 and 1830. Second, it examines the Upper Canadian legislation of 1830 that provided public funds for the creation and operation of agricultural societies in each district of the colony. I employ records of agricultural societies established in the Niagara, Home, and Midland Districts (centred on St. Catharines, Toronto, and Kingston, respectively) to understand each society’s leadership and activities. They, along with similar district agricultural societies across the colony, became semi-public agents of agricultural improvement, for they were privately constituted while operating under provincial mandate using public funds to promote agricultural improvements best suited to their individual region for the collective improvement of Upper Canada.
In the final chapters of the book, I examine how some Upper Canadian improvers formed the Agricultural Association of Upper Canada in 1846 to host an annual provincial agricultural exhibition. I demonstrate that leaders of this association developed into a successful lobby, convincing the colonial government to better organize leadership of agricultural societies while assuming a more central leadership role of agricultural improvement. Aided by the colony’s nascent agricultural press, these improvers drafted multiple pieces of legislation and employed fellow improvers within the colonial legislature to secure introduction and passage of their bills. The colonial government’s establishment of a Board of Agriculture for Upper Canada in 1850 at the improvers’ request represents a significant example of such successes.
I employ the 1852 Provincial Agricultural Exhibition to assess the improvers’ promotion of improvement and development of the colonial state. While the Toronto event featured a broad range of quality competitions and exhibits, the most significant advances were witnessed beyond the fairground. Several years earlier, the provincial agricultural association had lobbied successfully for a Chair of Agriculture to be included as part of the new University of Toronto’s faculty. During the exhibition, the board, which included the university’s recently appointed agriculture professor as its secretary, toured the campus’ new experimental farm. That land and the university’s short-lived agriculture program was an early phase of what would be relaunched in the 1870s as the Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph.
Elsewhere, the government announced that it would appoint a Minister of Agriculture to lead a new bureau. In leading the Bureau of Agriculture, the minister would rely on the established network of local agricultural societies as its volunteer bureaucracy across the entire Province of Canada, for the colony included both Upper Canada and Lower Canada following their political union in 1841 (Lower Canada had its own network of agricultural societies). At Confederation in 1867, the bureau would provide the foundation for a new federal Department of Agriculture for the Dominion of Canada as well as provincial departments of agriculture to be created within post-Confederation Ontario and Quebec.
In writing the book, I hoped its subjects might spur fresh investigation into the colonial era by pointing readers to valuable sources about animal breeds and plant varieties identified in the colony’s newspapers and its agricultural press (an underutilized resource). As I discuss in the book’s conclusion, I also hope that the book might encourage scholars to unpack the directives and activities of the Province of Canada’s Bureau of Agriculture from 1852-1867. By Confederation, its minister and deputy minister oversaw a diverse portfolio of responsibilities related to agricultural improvement: some 400 agricultural societies; census and statistics; patents and copyrights; arts and manufactures; immigration; and colonization. Each component provided an element critical to achieving late nineteenth-century goals of progress and nation building.
Agriculture and its improvement was at the core of Upper Canadian state formation.
Agriculture and its improvement was at the core of Upper Canadian state formation. If it continued to be the core of an expanding Province of Canada and, later, influence the new Dominion of Canada, then agricultural improvement’s role in state formation throughout this period requires fresh examination. For example, how did established networks of agricultural societies and other rural organizations influence departments of agriculture at the provincial and federal levels and, together, shape agricultural economies and rural landscapes? My charting of agricultural improvement efforts in Upper Canada identifies that colonial state formation looked different and emerged from ideologies and energies quite different from twenty-first century assumptions of how the Canadian state is constructed and how it functions.
Much about Ontario has changed significantly since the 1852 creation of a Bureau of Agriculture. Little changed, however, is Canadians’ continued reliance on federal and provincial departments of agriculture to promote continued agricultural improvement. Similarly, the rural calendar in Ontario, and elsewhere in Canada, continues to be dotted with dates for exhibitions to attend so that we might witness the latest agricultural, and other, improvements.
Feature Image: Mrs. Tice’s Farm on the Mountain near Queenston. Elizabeth Simcoe. September 12, 1795. Credit: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1938-223-29.
Ross Fair