GrainsWest Fall 2018

Fall 2018 Grains West 26 FEATURE to Lloydminster, SK in the north and encompassed Regina to the east. We now understand that this region is far from uniform and features a patchwork of soil types. New wheat varieties and irrigation would later turn these fields into some of the most productive in Alberta. Alberta’s agricultural origins lie in a chain of events that began millions of years ago. Mountains made our bedrock and glaciers pulverized it. Plants then built various types of soil that now interact with mountain-driven climate to influence what crops can growwhere. But the story of Alberta’s soil development has a fewmore curious chapters. Biologists call much of the province a “buffalo landscape” because millions of bison pounded the Prairies, grazed along its margins and stamped out the spread of trees and shrubs. They helped build North America’s chernozems. For thousands of years, people burned grasslands and parklands in part to provide food for bison, as lush grass grows in recent burns. Early explorers in the province observed how First Nations controlled vegetation as their fires burned back the constantly advancing forests. The actions of buffalo, people and climate created the grasslands found through central Alberta and up to Peace River Country north of the well-named Grande Prairie and High Prairie. Grazing and burning helped produce the inviting grasslands that greeted Alberta’s early farmers. Blackfoot First Nations in Alberta farmed tobacco for several hundred years before Europeans arrived. Archaeological evidence also suggests corn may have been traded into Alberta centuries ago but domestic grains and cattle ranching didn’t arrive in the province until the 1800s. Over-hunting to feed fur traders and settlers in the first half of the 1800s wiped out Alberta’s buffalo herds and opened the Prairies to cattle, while treaties in the second half of the 1800s forced many First Nations to relocate. This happened at about the same time as the Dominion Lands Act was passed by the federal government in 1872 to encourage homesteading in Western Canada. To help settle the West, national programs of railway construction pushed rails to Calgary (1882) and Edmonton (1891), which made it possible to move immigrants, livestock (including horses for ploughing), machinery (such as tractors and seed drills) and supplies. Large-scale irrigation began in the first decade of the 1900s. All of this contributed to an agriculture boom with major impacts on soil development. In the early days, ground was Map:ToddKristensen Photo:WaterfordCountyMuseum.D ungarvan, IrelandandSeanMurphy In 1857, Captain John Palliser declaredmuch of southeast Alberta unsuitable for agri- culture. However, the area’s patchwork of soil zones proved to be highly productive.