Grasses tame and wild: Imperial entanglements in settler colonial cereal breeding and botany

Abstract

This article argues that imperial and local state-supported science played a key role in the discursive and material changes – including political, economic, and ecological – in Canadian settler colonialism. I advance this argument through two case studies from Canada's Experimental Farm Service: the breeding of Marquis wheat and attempts to domesticate wild rice as ornamental feed for game birds. Marquis wheat has been celebrated for its role in expanding the wheat growing regions of Canada's Prairies, whereas wild rice's role was transferred from food to ornamental. The movements of these plants through the scientific milieu of the Experimental Farm Service demonstrate how the state used science to lift up settler communities while holding down Indigenous communities.

Trust, Risk, and Dissonance: Prairie Agriculture and Canada’s Environmental Farm Plan

“…The PFRA presented these innovations through agricultural improvement associations, which empowered farmers to direct the path of conservation ('PFRA: The Story of Conservation on the Prairies' 1961). Farmers were compliant with guidelines and quickly picked up on new technologies, likely due to existing networks of trust with government experimental farms (Anderson 2018) and their vested interest in the economic benefits of reducing soil erosion (Stefanik 2015). The educational approach was successful again in the 1970s and 80s through various conservation programs aimed at adopted new seeding technologies to reduce soil erosion (Montpetit 2002).…”

“…It also allowed the bureaucrats in Ottawa to govern the landscape from afar effectively (Bantjes 2005). As Prairie history progressed, modern transnational economics (Magnan 2016), socialist and capitalist practices of governance (Bantjes 2000), and techno-scientific applications (Anderson 2018;Eaton 2013) aided the landscape's transformation into what it is today. These forces shaped the Prairies into a deeply rationalized model of agricultural production, growing vast monocultures cultivating wheat, oil seed, and livestock to sell to markets across the globe.…”

“…Central to practices of modernity is an attempt to disassemble the biological processes of nature and reassemble them within the controlled mechanisms of capitalism. This process can be seen all over the Prairies with the development of Marquis wheat to survive the difficult Prairie winters in the late-19 th century (Anderson 2018) to the proliferation of genetically modified seeds that permit additional pesticides in the 21 st century (Eaton 2013). However, the attempt to subordinate nature has come under fire from farmers' movements arguing against corporate control and environmentalists highlighting the looming threat of climate change.…”