page_title: Agriculture in Upper Canada
section_title: Gentlemanly farming
hierarchical_section_title: Agriculture in Upper Canada / Gentlemanly farming
caption_attribution_description: A picture of a Hereford bull. Taken by the US Department of Agriculture. Thumbnail at en:Image:Hereford_bull_thumb.jpg.
context_page_description: Upper Canada had few exports with which to pay for its imported manufactured needs. For those who settled in rural areas, debt could be paid off only through the sale of wheat and flour. However, for much of the 1820s, the price of wheat went through cycles of boom and bust depending upon the British markets that ultimately provided the credit upon which the farmer lived.
  In the decade 1830-9, exports of wheat averaged less than £1 per person a year, and in the 1820s just half that.
context_section_description: "Improved farming" refers to a capital-intensive form of farming introduced by the "improving landlords" of Great Britain - the aristocracy who had large estates that they were beginning to farm as capitalist enterprises. These improved farming methods were introduced to Upper Canada by the half-pay military officers from aristocratic background who tended to become magistrates in Upper Canada and build large estates. "Mixed or improved farming was one part of a total life-style... As well as permitting them to practise improved farming and to develop a reasonably elegant life-style, their financial independence allowed them the leisure time necessary for them to act as 'leaders' of their community." The improved methods included the use of fallow, fertilizer and crop rotation. They followed a pattern of mixed farming, with an emphasis on animal husbandry, rather than mono-cropping wheat. They introduced hybrid animals, often at great cost, from the United Kingdom. For an example of these hybrid seeds see:
  William Custead "Catalogue of fruit & ornamental trees, flowering shrubs, garden seeds and green-house plants, bulbous roots & flower seeds, cultivated and for sale at the Toronto Nursery, Dundas Street, near York"  (York (Toronto): William Lyon Mackenzie, Colonial Advocate Press, 1827), 18 pp.
caption: A Hereford bull of the type imported after 1817
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