Such men are to be found in every Province already. Here is one. He has cut his coat strictly according to his cloth. He does not try to farm one acre more than he can handle with his own small capital, supplemented by very little credit. He works no more land and carries no more stock than he can thoroughly cultivate and care for in normal times by himself, or with such help as his family can give—and occasionally the neighbors, to whom he lends his help in turn. He spares neither brain work nor hand work to produce—not simply the largest quantity, but the most that can be got of the highest quality, so as to secure the highest net cash yield per acre and per hour.
I know his family are well dressed and well fed, for I have more than once dropped in unexpectedly, about meal times. There is always plenty of variety on the table, but you notice, even in winter, that almost everything on the bill of fare was raised right there. A little tea and sugar are their only imports; British Columbian apples are the only food from outside the farm.
This man has been improving his land steadily from the start, till almost the last inch of his quarter is under cultivation. He is a hard worker, of course; “but I don’t kill myself,” he says; “what’s the use? I don’t want the moon.” Yet he is by no means lacking in ambition. He had a very high ambition from the beginning—to be independent—and he has got more than he aimed at; while thousands who aimed at something much bigger have overshot the mark, through over-ambition, and are not even independent, but struggling in the chains of heavy debt.
Small men, or rather men with small means, can do big things by working together, as the Danes have shown us by the wonderful results of their combination of scientific dairying and hog-raising with nation-wide co-operation in marketing.
This Province of Manitoba has been learning fast in the last few years. She still grows over two million acres of wheat—Saskatchewan has twelve million and Alberta nearly six—but no longer stakes her whole existence on that crop. In 1920 butter and cheese factories received from Manitoban farmers the milk or cream of 24,600 cows. By 1923 that number had risen to 107,200, yielding 10,730,000 pounds of butter and 231,000 of cheese. In the same year Alberta sold 17,870,000 pounds of butter and 1,865,000 of cheese, from 158,000 cows, while Saskatchewan’s output, from 95,400 cows, was 10,870,000 pounds of butter and 119,000 of cheese. A few years ago we were importing butter to the prairie; now we are exporting butter from this same prairie to England, and the people there are delighted with its quality.