Butter Cheese
1900 7,559,542 lb. 131,967,612 lb.
1910 13,699,153 " 157,631,883 "

For the past ten or twelve years the farmers of Ontario have been
slowly adjusting their work to the new situation, and the transition is
continuing. While in some sections farms are being enlarged so as to
permit the more extensive use of labour-saving machinery and the more
economical handling of live stock, in other sections, particularly in
counties adjacent to the Great Lakes, large farms are being cut up into
smaller holdings and intensive production of fruits and vegetables is
now the practice. This, of course, results in a steady increase in land
values and is followed by an increase in rural population. The farmers
of Ontario are putting forth every effort to meet the demands for food
products. The one great difficulty that they have encountered has been
the scarcity of farm labour. Men have come from Europe by the tens of
thousands, but they have been drawn largely to the growing towns and
cities by the high wages offered in industrial lines; and the West, the
'Golden West' as it is sometimes called, has proved an even stronger
attraction. It seems rarely to occur to the new arrival that the average
farm in Ontario could produce more than a quarter section of prairie
land. Signs, however, point to an increase in rural population, through
the spread of intensive agriculture.

Before referring to the methods of instruction and assistance provided
for the developing of this new agriculture in Ontario, reference should
be made to one thing that is generally overlooked by those who
periodically discover this rapid urban increase, and who moralize most
gloomily upon a movement that is to be found in nearly every progressive
country of the civilized world. In the days of early settlement the
farmer and his family supplied nearly all their own wants. The farmer
produced all his own food; he killed his own stock, salted his pork, and
smoked his hams. His wife was expert in spinning and weaving, and
plaited the straw hats for the family. The journeyman shoemaker dropped
in and fitted out the family with boots. The great city industries were
then unknown. The farmer's wife in those days was perhaps the most
expert master of trades ever known. She could spin and weave, make a
carpet or a rug, dye yarns and clothes, and make a straw hat or a birch
broom. Butter, cheese, and maple sugar w