Trans-Taiga Road (2004)

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

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/

Does it matter if it’s fertile though? Isn’t the climate there the limiting factor on ag?

You can grow plenty of food there: wheat, potatoes, apples, cabbage, etc.

It's roughly at the same latitude as Moscow.

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.