Look at that three-acre picture, set in a broad green frame of maple, ash, willow, poplar and dainty caragana, and filled with melons, tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries, giant cabbages, onions and potatoes—all watered, like the farm beyond, from the St. Mary River, near Lethbridge. “I thought there was no such color as green up here when we came in first,” says the farmer’s wife, “but that was before we turned the water on. And look at it now!” It is a sight for sore eyes.
Do you hear the hum of bees? They are flying to and from that cottage yonder. The lady knitting at the door, under a shady porch of wild hop-vine, says she makes $10 per square foot of her “holding,” which is a two-by-two wooden stand with a hive on it. The bees pasture on the neighbors’ alfalfa, and bring her $40 worth of honey in a season. Reckon what that comes to per acre, if you have the time and arithmetic. Somebody must have reckoned it up, for he has just brought in ten million bees for distribution through these Western Provinces.
Eastward still we fly. Do you smell gas? That is the “medicine” of Medicine Hat. Puncture the earth, and up it comes: ready-made light and heat. Hot-house flowers grown by that heat have beautified the tables of Montreal, 2,000 miles away.
Here we are skimming over a cattle ranch. The old-style ranch is not quite dead, but is on its last legs—like the old-style caterpillar that shrivels up into a chrysalis before its resurrection into a beautiful new-style butterfly. Listen to the rancher talking to one of his neighbors. “I’ve got to go out of business,” says he.
“No,” says neighbor; “just change it, as I did. I used to let the beasts rustle, and turn them off as four or five-year-olds. Now, the market for that sort of stuff is gone. I breed them and feed them through the winter, so they’re in fine shape as two-year-olds, and at the worst of times I get a good enough price for a good beast. Here’s the latest Government report from the Winnipeg stockyards: ‘The market was draggy owing to the poor quality of the offerings, but there was a good demand for anything showing quality and flesh.’ They’ve been telling us that for years, and it’s time we took it in.”
Hear the music rising from the next ranch—sheep baa-ing for their lambs. Their owner was not satisfied with the common range ewes, weighing about 100 pounds and giving five or six pounds of wool. Six years ago he began buying pure-bred rams, and now his average is 175 pounds of sheep and nearly ten pounds of wool. Quality, only quality pays. And quality in the beast shows quality in the man.