Most active commenters
  • noduerme(3)

←back to thread

Trans-Taiga Road (2004)

(www.jamesbayroad.com)
154 points jason_pomerleau | 18 comments | 03 Jul 25 01:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.406s | source | bottom
1. newyankee ◴[03 Jul 25 02:55 UTC] No.44451201[source]▶
Its funny when I saw this road, I realised the distance is probably more than the N-S or E-W distance of Bangladesh , a country with > 171 million people last checked.

In fact barely equal to the diagonal length of the country. How much ever one talks about fertile plains, tropical weather being able to support more people, this no is still bonkers to me

replies(4): >>44451295 #>>44451548 #>>44451939 #>>44458439 #
2. retrac ◴[03 Jul 25 03:13 UTC] No.44451295[source]▶
The low population density of central Canada is not because it's not fertile.

A few hundred kilometres south of the area in the article, is a vast clay belt of about half a million square kilometres. It's fertile. You can grow potatoes and oats and the usual garden vegetables up there. Somewhat settled on the Quebec side, and there are farms, but less than 5% of the area suitable for agriculture, is currently used for agriculture. It's a region about the size of France, and there are no large cities, and the total population is about 100,000.

You can even see the Quebec/Ontario border from space in some spots, because the Ontario side is wholly undeveloped: https://www.google.com/maps/@48.7805302,-79.5591059,52996m/

replies(2): >>44451433 #>>44451983 #
3. bix6 ◴[03 Jul 25 03:42 UTC] No.44451433[source]▶
Does it matter if it’s fertile though? Isn’t the climate there the limiting factor on ag?
replies(3): >>44451579 #>>44451815 #>>44453143 #
4. ◴[03 Jul 25 04:08 UTC] No.44451548[source]▶
5. rfrey ◴[03 Jul 25 04:15 UTC] No.44451579{3}[source]▶
The short growing season is somewhat offset by the very long summer days.
6. cyberax ◴[03 Jul 25 05:09 UTC] No.44451815{3}[source]▶
You can grow plenty of food there: wheat, potatoes, apples, cabbage, etc.

It's roughly at the same latitude as Moscow.

replies(1): >>44453063 #
7. noduerme ◴[03 Jul 25 05:35 UTC] No.44451939[source]▶
That's not specific to this road. You could probably pick any 50,000 sq km area on the planet besides Bangladesh, and the population density would be several orders of magnitude lower than that of Bangladesh, except for maybe the few largest metropolitan areas in the world. Bangladesh can't support half its population, and Canada could probably support 10x its population, so one has to conclude that the wild difference in fertility rate is not as simple to explain as a function of how much land there is or how much food can be produced there.
8. noduerme ◴[03 Jul 25 05:43 UTC] No.44451983[source]▶
Fascinating! The border between Quebec and Ontario looks like the Mexican border with the US, or the Israeli border with Egypt, but this is all in the same country, Canada. In the US you can see some traces of this between Nevada and California or Idaho and Oregon, due to different laws and tax structures. Obviously if it's a sharp difference in land use along an arbitrary imaginary line, it must be due to the governance. So why is the Quebec side so much more farmed and developed?

[edit] one reason in the US for those sorts of divisions has to do with water rights. I think that probably applies to my other two examples as well. Buy I don't understand how that would be an issue in the northern parts of Canada.

replies(1): >>44452315 #
9. retrac ◴[03 Jul 25 06:43 UTC] No.44452315{3}[source]▶
Different history of colonization policy in Quebec and Ontario. Colonization in Ontario was shut down in the 1930s during the Great Depression. In Quebec, formal colonization was more tightly integrated with the Church, had more institutional support, and officially continued until 1973. There were still government-backed homesteading projects in the 1960s in Quebec. Also, on the Ontario side in the early 20th century there was no road/rail connection except via Quebec. Which meant that development in the region was tied more to Quebec than southern Ontario. And Ontario had little reason to support that. So it remained government land on the Ontario side. Or at least that's how I understand it.
replies(2): >>44453041 #>>44454525 #
10. noduerme ◴[03 Jul 25 08:58 UTC] No.44453041{4}[source]▶
Thanks for the history. Very interesting. I guess Ontario still isn't interested in trying to farm land further north now..? The last time I was in Australia (15 years ago), I met a French chef in the middle of nowhere in the Northern Territory (he walked out of the bush with a can of kangaroo meat to say hello) who told me he was being paid something like $500 per month by the government just to live out in the middle of nowhere and homestead, which I found astonishing.
11. orthoxerox ◴[03 Jul 25 09:02 UTC] No.44453063{4}[source]▶
Yes, and no one sane invests into agriculture around Moscow when there's much more warmer and fertile land down south. Factory farms and greenhouses? Yes, certainly, but this is driven by the food demands of a massive metropolis next door: move east or west far enough to offset this benefit and you will see scenes of rural decay.
replies(2): >>44453283 #>>44456535 #
12. antupis ◴[03 Jul 25 09:16 UTC] No.44453143{3}[source]▶
It depends, like here in Finland, there is lots of farmland and active farms, but most is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humid_continental_climate , Norway also has a lot of farms in subarctic areas like this in the article, but Norway is substituting farming very heavily even European standards.
replies(2): >>44453270 #>>44453951 #
13. decimalenough ◴[03 Jul 25 09:35 UTC] No.44453270{4}[source]▶
*subsidizing
14. decimalenough ◴[03 Jul 25 09:36 UTC] No.44453283{5}[source]▶
That's because small-scale farming is not sufficient profitable, not because it's not possible. You can find scenes of rural decay in most any industrialized country.
15. mytailorisrich ◴[03 Jul 25 11:35 UTC] No.44453951{4}[source]▶
Both Finland and Norway have low population, too, because overall the climate is too harsh for high-yield agriculture.
16. nsavage ◴[03 Jul 25 12:55 UTC] No.44454525{4}[source]▶
I think you're right, but I don't think 'colonization' ever really stopped in Ontario - it just moved elsewhere. While Quebec was incentivized to develop its regions, there were more valuable places for Ontario capital to flow to, such as Alberta.

The difference between the two is language really and the urge to develop Quebec as a sovereign country, that drive has never been there for Ontario because Ontario is Canada, at least in the eyes of Ontarians. You don't see people in Ontario proud of being Ontarian as you do in Quebec, the Maritimes, Alberta, etc, instead they're proud of being Canadian.

17. cyberax ◴[03 Jul 25 16:12 UTC] No.44456535{5}[source]▶
Plenty of people invest in agriculture around Moscow. That's why Russia is one of the leaders in food exports.

To be fair, the bulk of the most productive Russian agricultural lands actually ends around Moscow's latitude.

18. LAC-Tech ◴[03 Jul 25 19:34 UTC] No.44458439[source]▶
Its funny when I saw this road, I realised the distance is probably more than the N-S or E-W distance of Bangladesh , a country with > 171 million people last checked.

I feel like you've just given the Canadian Government some ideas