Jim Dalrymple, James White and David Hume have just published an important and interesting book entitled “The Livestock Industry in Ontario – A Century of Achievement.”
This 250-page book describes changes in the dairy, poultry and pork industry over the last century. It also has a chapter describing how technology has affected food production from 1900 to 2000.
It begins with the authors describing some of the technological advances agriculture has made in the last 100 years. How many know, for instance, that there were 776,000 horses on Ontario farms in 1916, but by 1961 this number had declined to 89,000, while tractors had increased to about 150,000.
A “big” tractor in the 1950s was approaching 50 hp. I can remember when my neighbour purchased an International W-6 which was then considered one of the largest in the neighbourhood. The 37-hp International Farmall W6 Standard gas tractor was rated as a three-plow tractor. The author says that, over the century, the percentage of capital invested in equipment increased from six per cent to 13 per cent of gross income and the investment in livestock and poultry decreased from 14 to six per cent.