21

When asked about their attitude regarding the future of the area, 26 per
cent of the settlers were pessimistic or indifferent. The reason given mostly
concerned the cost of marketing their products and the heavy capital investment
needed for clearing and breaking the land. The majority, however, were
optimistic about the future of farming in the area although many who were,
tempered their optimism with the qualification that financial assistance was needed
to help in land clearing and breaking. Others mentioned that something should
be done to make markets more accessible if agriculture were to prosper. In
short, the general feeling was that probable farm surplus would be insufficient
to pay for land developemnt and that some form of subsidy was necessary.

CLEARING AND BREAKING

In bringing the land under cultivation the job of removing the forest growth
had been accomplished mainly by hand labour without the aid of mechanical
equipment. Most of the clearing had been done by the operators themselves
though many of them had had various amounts cleared under contract. In
many instances stumps had to be blasted out after the forest had been removed
and that added considerably to the cost of bringing the land under cultivation.
Most farmers had broken the cleared land with their own equipment, usually
with horsepower. In later years, however, more tractors had been brought into
the area and these were being used more frequently on a custom basis by farmers
for breaking. i

No attempt was made in this study to estimate the cost of clearing in terms
of labour requirements. It is obvious that the time required would vary con-
siderably with the type of cover and the number of large stumps that required
removal. The fact that it was costly in terms of labour is illustrated by the
slow rate at which the land had been brought under cultivation. On the average
farmers had cleared and broken 2-0 acres per farm annually in the Prince George
district, 3-1 in the Vanderhoof district and 3-7 in the Smithers-Francois Lake
districts.

Twenty-nine farms had had clearing done on a hired or contract basis.
For this work they had paid as high as $100 per acre on land with a heavy bush
cover and as low as $5 per acre where the cover was light. The average cost of

Logged over land being cleared for breaking.