Grainswest - Fall 2021

Fall 2021 Grains West 20 BY IAN DOIG • PHOTOS BY ZOLTAN VARADI Progressive far-north farmers shed the region’s frontier reputation THE PEACE PROCESS T he first all-weather road to link Alberta’s Peace Country to the rest of the world was built in the 1930s. As road trips go, it was a doozy. The dirt track was no more than a glorified trail that linked Edmonton with Fort St. John in northeast British Columbia by way of Lesser Slave Lake. A South Peace Historical Society writeup describes it as “a twisting, squirming route that turned into an impassable bog of gumbo after frequent cloudbursts.” It was known locally as the worst road in North America. Bad as that road was, in prior decades, aspiring farmers had fought their way through the bush to build new lives on their own terms in this remote region reputed for rich soil and mighty sunlight hours. Though barley was reportedly grown at Fort Dunvegan in 1809, Peace Country agriculture only began to grow significantly beyond the subsistence level in the early years of the 1900s. Land was steadily broken for farm production as successive waves of settlers arrived during the Great Depression and after the Second World War. Wheat and barley were exported from the Peace Country starting in the 1920s when a rail line from Edmonton penetrated the region. Legumes and grasses were established as seed crops in the ’30s and ’40s, as was flax, while barley acres exploded in the ’40s and ’50s. Rapeseed proliferated in the ’50s. In 1965, A.A. Guitard, then-director of the Beaverlodge Research Station, described the Peace Country as “this ‘Inland Empire’ of ours … Now it is a well-developed, well-serviced and diversified region rich in timber, minerals and sources of energy. There is a broad-based, diversified agricultural industry.” His informed words suggest a region that had rapidly modernized. The declaration is ancient, but something of the Peace Country’s frontier reputation remains in the popular imagination. Resident farmers are quick to point out their Inland Empire is just as progressive as it was in Guitard’s day. FEATURE