Stéphane Castonguay and Colin Coates
This is the ninth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posed with NiCHE
The relationship between agriculture and the Anthropocene unfolds across a temporal and conceptual spectrum punctuated by the various proposals for a “Golden Spike.”1 At one end of this spectrum lie the first domestications of plants and animals, which initiated an anthropogenic alteration of Earth’s climatic trajectory. At the other end stands the Great Acceleration and its planetary dashboards that document the explosive growth of human impacts after the Second World War as indicated by the extinction of species, the expansion of domesticated land, deforestation, increased nitrogen in the atmosphere, and rising atmospheric methane concentrations.2 Together, these indicators reveal the transformation of agriculture into a global force reshaping the Earth system.
Yet the processes associated with the Great Acceleration did not emerge suddenly after 1945. At regional scales, earlier agricultural transformations set in motion socio-ecological trajectories that anticipated many of its defining characteristics. The dairy transition that transformed Laurentian agriculture in the late nineteenth century offers one such example.3 This was the most substantial agricultural change since the arrival of European settlers in the region in the seventeenth century. Driven by the growing demand in the British market for butter and cheese, it reshaped land use, livestock populations, patterns of farm ownership, and agro-industrial infrastructure in ways that foreshadowed later processes of agricultural intensification, specialization, capitalization, and environmental change.4 Viewed from this perspective, the Laurentian dairy revolution can be understood as an early manifestation of the processes later captured globally by the concept of the Great Acceleration.
The changes in Laurentian agricultural production resulting from the rise of dairy farming at the end of the nineteenth century can be summarized as follows: within fifty years, the average dairy herd on each farm increased by nearly two-thirds, while the proportion of land devoted to feeding dairy cows increased by more than one-fifth for pasture and more than doubled for forage crops.5
From an ecological perspective, mixed farming was far more sustainable than the cereal monoculture practiced since the beginning of European colonization. The reliance on the repeated sowing and harvesting of wheat led to the depletion of soil fertility. However, the crop and livestock specialization associated with mixed farming resulted in a loss of biodiversity in Laurentian rural environments and contributed to the industrialization of the countryside.
The growth of dairy cattle population—by nearly one-fifth across the province and slightly less than two-thirds on the average farm—occurred at the expense of sheep. The near stability of sheep numbers (from 824,981 to 856,169 head between 1871 and 1921) masks a relative decline in their presence in the Laurentian countryside, owing to the emergence of larger flocks on the fringes of the ecumene, where the number of small farms increased. Horses remained the primary source of farm labour until the Second World War, but they did not rival dairy cows in number, as cattle came to dominate the animal landscape. These changes concerned not only the size of the herd—the number of cattle increased from 406,542 to 796,029 between 1871 and 1921—but also its composition. Census data from the early decades of the twentieth century reveal the growing predominance of dairy breeds, particularly Ayrshires and Canadienne, within Quebec’s livestock population.
