The Great Acceleration of the Laurentian Dairy Transition

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

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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.

Census of Canada (1871–1921) and, for 1700–1861, vol. IV of the 1871 census.

The dairy specialization of Laurentian agriculture was also reflected in patterns of land use. Farmers devoted more land to animal feed than to crops intended for direct human consumption, whether through natural pastures or forage production. Another characteristic of the landscape transformation associated with the dairy transition was the concentration of land ownership. Farmers seeking to expand their herds or support larger numbers of livestock took advantage of the abandonment of small (4–20 ha) and medium-sized (20–40 ha) farms to enlarge their holdings. The increase in the average size of farm properties also reflected efforts to make increasingly expensive machinery economically viable and to compensate for labour shortages.

Thus, dairy specialization and land-use intensification went hand in hand in the Laurentian countryside. The replacement of cereal crops by pastures and hay meadows created favourable conditions for the expansion of a cattle population that had initially been deficient in both quantity and quality. The rise of dairy farming accelerated this process while encouraging farmers to increase the size of their operations in order to support growing numbers of dairy cattle.

The industrialization of Laurentian agriculture during the dairy transition resulted in the emergence of large-scale commercial farms. Although their owners belonged to an elite whose resources greatly exceeded those of the farming population as a whole, their operations illustrate the transition from largely self-sufficient farms to enterprises deeply integrated into a market economy. They also exemplify the transformation of an increasingly industrialized agroecosystem, in which intensified land use and expanded areas devoted to forage crops and pastures supported a growing and specialized cattle population through the selection of dairy breeds.

Beyond the emergence of large farms—often at the expense of smaller farms that disappeared from the rural landscape—the industrialization of the Laurentian countryside was also reflected in the proliferation of cheese and butter factories that dotted the rural environment. At the provincial level, after two decades of steady growth, the number of factories increased exponentially between 1890 and 1900.

J.A. Ruddick, L’industrie laitière au Canada. Tableau historique et descriptif, bulletin 28? (Ottawa, Ministère de l’Agriculture, Division du commissaire de l’industrie laitière et de la réfrigération, 1911).

The emergence of factories and large commercial farms coincided with the simplification of livestock production and the intensification of land use through the expansion of forage crops and pastureland. These developments reflected increased capitalization of an industrial rural landscape, as both agricultural production and food processing required increasingly large financial investments. The effects were long lasting, paving the way for another wave of landscape changes after the Second World War, associated with the widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, increasing mechanization and dependence on fossil fuels, and the growing production of animal waste which resulted from the concentration of livestock farming.⁶ Indicators for these ecological consequences exhibited an exponential growth, a trend also experienced by the bovine population and the cheese and butter factories in Quebec in the late nineteenth century. Thus, the anthropogenic impacts of Laurentian agriculture had already begun to accelerate during the dairy transition.

Stéphane Castonguay is a professor in the Department of Humanities at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and a researcher at the Centre interuniversitaire d’études québécoises (www.cieq.ca). His research analyzes the genesis of the Canadian agri-food system and its integration into international trade.

Colin Coates is a full professor of Canadian studies at Glendon College, York University. His research focuses on the environmental, social, and cultural history of the St. Lawrence Valley. Castonguay and Coates recently published in the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, “Remember Bristol and the “French Cheese” The marketing of Quebec and Ontario dairy products in Great Britain, 1880-1914”.

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1. E. Reisman et al., “Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111, no. 3 (2021): 687–697.

2. W. Steffen et al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 81–98, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019614564785.

3. S. Castonguay et C. Coates, 2026, “ L’écologie du régime alimentaire britannique et l’agriculture laurentienne, 1871–1921,” Études rurales, 116 (forthcoming).

4. On the landscape changes of Quebec agriculture after the Second World War, see Julie Ruiz, “Modernisation de l’agriculture et occupation des terres agricoles au Québec (1951-2011), ” Cahiers de géographie du Québec 63 (2019): 213–230.

5. Régis Thibault, “Périodisation et spatialisation des débuts de l’industrie litière au Québec, 1871-1911,” Histoire sociale/Social History 29, no. 57 (1996): 133–157.

6. Marit Rosol and Christoph Rosol, “Food, pandemics and the Anthropocene: On the necessity of food and agricultural change,” Canadian Food studies, 9, no. 1 (2022): 281–293.