In a time without the internet, farmers could not simply google best farming practices, neither could they access new experiments and research that helped improve productivity and manage livestock. Farmers often relied on advice from other farmers in the community as well as experimentation by trial and error. Still, agricultural advice literature and other published guides flourished in the nineteenth century, particularly in newspapers, pamphlets, and other published sources of information.
George Heriot, Greenwich Park, PEI c1795
Agricultural advice was naturally very specific to each region’s environmental and market conditions. We needed to know how early farmers in Atlantic Canada were feeding their livestock, including the historical role of pasture, hay, and marsh grasses in addition to roots and grains. The region has abundant marshlands, but also very harsh winters. How did farmers use their local environment to keep livestock fed and sheltered, and how did those practices change with changing land use and the rising demand from urban markets? To answer these questions, we created the feed and pasture project to collect historical publications that were either produced by or available to Atlantic Canadian farmers on subject of livestock husbandry and feeding.
Often they were recommendations for farmers, but sometimes they were also notices of pasture competitions/prizes, or articles about a new development such as a new community pasture opening, a new feed mill, etc. The project documents a variety of sources that shed light on the changing developments and efficiencies in the region’s livestock farm systems.
The signing of the Comprehensive Development Plan (CDP) in 1969 was one of the most influential events in the modernization of Prince Edward Island. The developmental plan offered wide-sweeping changes to the island’s economy, infrastructure, and education that still affect the province to this day.
Here at the GeoREACH laboratory, it is one of our goals to help others understand how exactly the CDP affected life on the Island, both in the past and today. For this reason, we have created a full, comprehensive timeline of the CDP, from the events leading to the CDP’s formation to its eventual conclusion in 1984. We hope that it is helpful in understanding this significant time period. Enjoy!
The poster that I produced at the UPEI GeoREACH Lab in the 2019 winter semester offers a unique glimpse into PEI’s past. Nick Scott, another GeoREACH lab member, found and scanned a map detailing the approximate property boundaries of almost all of PEI in the 1960s. We called this map the Beaulieu Map, after Andrée Beaulieu, a federal researcher with the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources. The Beaulieu map was based on aerial photos from the early 1960s, so while the plot sizes were not exactly accurate, they were extremely close for a hand-drawn map. This was a fascinating find. The map was created to support the Comprehensive Development Plan (CDP), one of the central research subjects of Dr. MacFadyen’s GeoREACH Lab at UPEI.
A Geospatial Analysis of Land Use and Cover Change on PEI, 1968-2010. Click to see in new tab.
I began this part of the project began by exploring avenues to try and use processes that would automatically digitize the map into a format that would work with the GIS softwares that the lab uses. Unfortunately, due a number of factors, such as limitations with GIS tools, creases in the map from folding, and inaccuracies in the map, we were unable to do so. As a result, I switched over to sampling six townships, and manually digitizing them. The result initially contained small errors in geometry, so we tried to minimize those using several GIS tools and by excluding slivers and small parcels from the analysis.
Getting the poster and preliminary analysis ready the Environmental Science Atlantic Conference was a real time crunch, and the first version of the poster had little quantitative data and little in the way of visual supplements. Over the following few weeks, the final poster (see above) was refined and presented to members of the GeoREACH Lab and other members of the UPEI community. I added added and rearranged new information, I completed additional quantitative analysis, and I added and edited more images to accurately reflect the research process and the story we uncovered.
Choyce Chappell presenting the first draft of the poster at the Environmental Science Atlantic Conference. Source: SciAtlantic on Flickr.
To perform the quantitative analysis, we categorized properties by the size of the parcel (a smallest size, three mid-sizes, and a largest size), and analysed land use by five dominant categories (cleared land, forested land, harvested clear-cuts; harvested partial cuts; and reverting land). Using this data, we were able to make some generalizations about ongoing trends among farms according to their property size, location, and land use. This is a unique glimpse into the lives of Prince Edward Islanders in the 1960s, finding many stories that could not have been told with other forms of historical analysis.
The true success of this work is knowing how much further it can go, and what it means for the future. This work is preliminary to digitizing the whole map, and can be used as a template for such a project. Additionally, the work can be used to see how much the CDP affected the land use and cover change, and the soil quality, of PEI over time, or to analyse the land use of properties by water shed, county, topographic features, and more. Even though I am no longer with them, I’m excited to see what the GeoREACH lab does with this work!
Choyce Chappell presenting the poster to the GeoREACH team and others at UPEI.
