News from our rich agriculture history

The Farms.com farm and rural history website is dedicated to celebrating and digitizing the last 150 years of success in the Canadian agriculture and food industry. The agriculture and food industries in Canada have a rich heritage of innovation, and have laid a foundation of excellence upon which we continue to grow. We celebrate Canada’s food and agriculture innovations on these pages.
Impressions of the Prairies
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED | JULY 8, 1920 | THE FARMER'S ADVOCATE

I think I was up somewhere about Fort William when I sent ye that last letter tellin’ o’ my hardships an’ givin’ ye my impressions o’ the country I was passin’ through.

Well, it gets to be a wee bit mair civilized lookin’ as one gets nearer Winnipeg an’, first thing ye ken ye’ve left the swamps an’ the rocks behind an’

Read more »
If Cows Could...

These advertisements appeared in the October and November 1933 issues of The Farmer. They were advertisements for “Dominion Dried Beet Pulp”, a feed designed

Read more »
Plow

This is a traditional horse-drawn steel plow that would have been familiar on most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century farms. One of the most ancient and important

Read more »



The U.F.O. Attitude Explained
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED | SEPTEMBER 18, 1919 | THE FARMER'S ADVOCATE

Kindly permit a few words of friendly comment on your editorial “The Provincial Political Arena.”

Let me say at the outset that, to the best of my knowledge, the farmers’ political uprising is absolutely spontaneous. It is not planned for or directed from headquarters; at best the central officers can but advise and try to send speakers in response to requests for

Read more »

lives lived

W.A. Dryden

MAY 29, 1881 - NOVEMBER 18, 1949

William Arthur Dryden was born on May 29, 1881 at Maple Shade Farm in the township of Whitby, Ontario. As the third of four generations of Dryden’s that inhabited lot 20, concession 7, W.A. (or ‘Bill’ as he was known to his friends and neighbours) brought international distinction to Maple Shade Farm in the breeding of cattle and sheep. In addition to his work in cementing the legacy of Maple Shade, Dryden also maintained a professional career that saw him take on major roles in a number of organizations dedicated to the promotion and betterment of Canadian

David Fife

1805 - JANUARY 9, 1877

The history of Canadian agriculture owes a great debt to the experimental efforts of one man. A Scotch immigrant farmer, David Fife was responsible for introducing a strain of wheat uniquely suited to the harsh and unforgiving Canadian climate. Known as Red Fife, this wheat served as the foundation of Canada’s agricultural prosperity through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Born in Scotland in 1805, David Fife immigrated to the Province of Upper Canada (modern-day Ontario) with his family in 1820. The family settled on a farm on Lot 22, Concession 4 in Otonabee, near

View more »