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By 1906, there were very few farmers in the Athabasca Landing
area, even though land had already been surveyed into quarter
sections. For a few years after Athabasca Landing became a
village (1905), it was easy to find an empty and potentially
farmable quarter section in the surrounding area. By the
beginning of World War I, almost all of the good farmland was
taken and much of the inferior land within a 15-mile radius of the Landing
had been filed upon. The crucial years for the homesteading boom
were 1909-14. Between these years, at least 1500 settlers and
their families, a population of perhaps 5000, moved into the
Athabasca area. Very few settlers proved their land to be
cultivated in the required three years. Most took at least
four years. Some took up to six years if they had to clear
woodland. Approximately 56 per cent of those who filed for a homestead
gave up due to the difficulty of clearing the land.
For a while, Athabasca Landing was valued as the grain growing
capital of the northwest since the first few years that the
homesteaders farmed were hot and fairly dry. Soon, though,
the farmers had to cope with late spring and early fall frosts
that froze their crops, and with violent summer storms that
flattened them. It was also soon discovered that, unless you
were a very skilled and fortunate farmer, the Athabasca area
could not compete with the southern prairies or the Peace
country as a locale for growing spring wheat. The land
was not rich enough and the growing season was not long enough.
This led to farmers diversifying and "mixed farming" became
commonplace.
Harvesting was a time of hard labour. While the homesteaders
could cut and bind their cereal crops with their own
horse-drawn binder, they needed help for threshing.
According to the Athabasca Historical Society, a handful of farmers did thresh by hand initially. It was
extremely labour-intensive work, time-consuming and wearisome. The
method that all Athabasca area farmers ended up using for threshing was
co-operation. One person owned a steam-powered threshing machine and went around from farm to farm. Many
pioneers worked on a threshing crew, and in turn hired it to do
their own harvest. About a dozen men, who worked from dawn till
dusk:
Starting in 1911, the Landing’s previous Member of the
Legislative Assembly, J.R. Boyle, an influential member
of the provincial government, worked to persuade his colleagues that Alberta’s seventh and last
Demonstration Farm should be located near the Landing.
Between 1912 and 1914 the farm was put into operations
on the east hill, about one and a half miles outside Athabasca.
Experiments with cultivation methods, new varieties of grain and
other new crops, and animal breeding were to be done on these
government run and owned farms. The Demonstration Farm
also provided homesteaders in the region with practical advice on how to
cultivate their land more efficiently. The local availability
of such useful advice made the area more attractive to
homesteaders. It meant better yields, more settlers, and higher
land values. (Athabasca Historical Society 1986, 105)
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