THE H.B. TRIBUNE FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1928 THE CANADIAN HARVEST

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVIII, Issue 233, 14 September 1928, Page 4

THE H.B. TRIBUNE FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1928 THE CANADIAN HARVEST

TV'RING the week we have heard a good deal by cable about the Canadian harvest. In the first place, we had the messages making allegations, as yet unsustaiued, of inhospitable treatment of British miners who have gone over to seek work in the wheatfields. Then, yesterday, we had the stupendous figures giving the official estimate of the B'g Dominion’s grain yield for the current season. Taking these first, they give some idea of the rapid development of the graingrowing industry. There is under wheat some 21 million acres, from which it is expected that over 550 million bushels will be threshed. This estimated yield is 76 million bushels greater than that of anj previous year, the increased acreage, as compared with last year’s, being well over 1J million. Then, the oats return is put down at 474 million bushels and the barley at 1441 million, also a “record.” What has to be borne in mind when contemplating these figures is that they are the outcome of a development of barely a halfcentury from areas which for many months of the year are snowcovered and which at the beginning of the period mentioned were regarded almost as waste land. These wonderful results have not been achieved without very much of costly experiment involving untold hardships and often heavy losses for the pioneers of the industry. Now, thanks to the enterprise, persistence, and endurance of those who founded it, it is probably one of the best organised and most profitable industries of the world, providing work for many thousands of hands and food for millions. Some idea of the conditions under which the harvesting of these vast crops is carried on was supplied to the London “Times” by a Canadian correspondent, anxious that the men coming to take part in the work should be under no illusion as to its nature and rewards. Harvesting in Canada, he tolls us, begins about the middle of August and usually extends to the end of October. There are often fine autumn days at first, then perhaps wet and cold spells, and much of the grain will he lying unthreshed in the fields when the first scurry of snow conies and frost again begins to bind the earth. Then there will follow one of the strange mysteries of Providence, an Indian summer, and in that last bright spell most of the grain will be threshed and carried to the railways to be borne to the termini from which it will be shipped across the seas. The extra hands required for this purely seasonal spurt of employment have hitherto been gathered from all parts of the Dominion and largely, also, from the

neighbouring grain-bearing States of the Union, whore the harvesting is earlier. Winnipeg is the concentration point for the great majority, and it is from there that they are distributed all over the grain-growing districts, involving train journeys running up to 1000 miles and frequently ending with an uncomfortable finish over rough roads and trails. The work of cutting, binding and shocking the sheaves is continuous, arduous, and monotonous in fields whose measurements are cast in miles. Though the sun may induce much sweat during the hours of labour, the nights are generally freezing cold, the ice having to be broken on the reservoirs from which water is drawn to slake the thirst of the day. The subsequent threshingtime is no less strenuous, advantage being taken of every minute of daylight. A man must have breakfasted and, if a teamster, fed his horses and be on the field at sunrise, and there he will remain until the sun sets, getting his supper after dark. To these conditions the regular harvest hands have become accustomed and enured, being content to put up with them in view of the good wages—from 15s a (lay upwards, and found—they are able to earn. But it will be readily guessed how they strike the home-keeping British miner, used to his union hours of labour and to his regular mealtimes, and no doubt this may account for the complaints of which so much has been made. Yet there are not a few of those that now have crops of their own to be garnered and threshed who themselves started out ns harvest hands. It is men of this calibre who have helped largely to make Canada the Breadbasket of the Empire.