Files
Abstract
Excerpts: So vast are the resources for dairying in Canada that there is little apparent relation between the physical possibilities of expansion on the one hand and on the other the very moderate gradual increase now in progress in volume of dairy production and an actually declining national surplus of dairy products. With a slightly greater total area than that of continental United States, Canada has developed a dairy industry at present little more than one-tenth as great as ours. This is due to the comparatively large proportion of Canadian lands that is unsuitable for agricultural use and to the sparse settlement and lack of development of a dairy industry in much of the potential dairy lands. Like Canadian agriculture generally, dairying is still extensive rather than intensive in its character, growth of the dairy industry in most sections of the country is as yet brought about more largely through expansion of farming area and increased numbers of cows milked than by means of any marked tendency toward general improvement in yield per cow. In fact, a considerable part of Canadian dairying is carried on as more or less supplementary to wheat and beef production, tending to increase when returns from these major branches are unsatisfactory and to decline with prosperity arising from them. When due allowance is made for shifts or adjustments to the most marketable of the dairy products, the physical possibilities of expansion in the Canadian dairy industry as indicated in the following descriptive material are still comparatively unexploited. Further expansion of the dairy industry of Canada will for many years be dependent only upon comparatively remunerative markets, domestic or foreign. The dairy development of Canada, in view of the potential dairy resources, can continue, without abandonment of extensive farming and extensive dairying, so characteristic of competition from that source, to maintain a strong position in world markets. Despite the similar but unequally developed processes of industrialization in the two countries, the United States has come to be regarded as of growing importance among these world markets for Canadian dairy products.