Lower Canada's Agricultural Crisis Caused a Reversion to Subsistence Agriculture

During much of the first half of the nineteenth century, agriculture in Lower Canada was in a state of crisis. Wheat failed, and there was no commercial substitute. Crop failures became more frequent after 1815, and by the 1830s wheat had failed permanently throughout much of the seigneurial land, which included most of the arable land along the St Lawrence River. In terms of expenditure priorities, wheaten flour ranked not far behind the omnipresent debt charges, but reports of malnutrition, hunger, and even starvation confirm the statistical evidence pointing to a sharp decline in consumption of wheat during the 1830s and 1840s. Quebec farmers could no longer produce enough wheat for their own consumption, let alone for export markets, and, having no other marketable commodity, the habitants reverted to a subsistence agriculture and to a diet based on potatoes, barley, and peas.

--John McCallum, introduction to Unequal Beginnings: Agriculture and Economic Development in Quebec and Ontario until 1870, The State and Economic Life (1980; repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 4.