An Unfailing Faith: A History of the Saskatchewan Dairy Industry

A.A. den Otter is a history professor at Memorial University of
Newfoundland and co-author of Lethbridge: A Centennial History.

Professor Gordon Church’s choice of title for this book testifies to a desire to win a rightful place in the historiography of western Canada for the dairy industry. While numerous volumes have been devoted to the prairie wheat staple, very little has been written about dairying. This hardly comes as a surprise: in 1928, for example, when the Saskatchewan crop was valued at $289 million, dairy farmers delivered a mere $7 million worth of products.

An Unfailing Faith traces the beginning and development of the Saskatchewan dairy industry. It explains that government policy sought to encourage dairying in order to make the Northwest more attractive to settlers. Once the settlement objective was achieved, the bureaucrats hoped to stabilize farm income through diversification, to regulate the market, and to keep Canada self-sufficient in dairy products. In the fluid milk sector, administrators sought to regulate a chaotic industry and to enforce minimum health standards. These goals were based on the assumption that Saskatchewan would follow the traditional pattern of frontier development, moving from subsistence crops to wheat specialization to diversified operations. Unfortunately, Saskatchewan was the last frontier; therefore, competitive pressures from other grain frontiers did not force its farmers to abandon the single crop for more efficient mixed production. Wheat remained king. Naturally, a policy based on erroneous presuppositions was destined to fail, and Professor Church concludes that, without government interference, business-like farmers could probably have established a healthier dairy industry. Whether Saskatchewan’s small urban population could have supported a large, vigorous dairy industry is a problem not emphasized by the author.

This is not a book for the casual reader. Although the narrative and technical matters are clearly explained, the nature of the topic and a less than dramatic style of writing make An Unfailing Faith difficult reading. On the other hand, the massive research and careful attention to detail make this an invaluable resource for the serious student of western Canadian history.