The problem of milk in the nineteenth-century Ontario cheese industry: an envirotechnical approach to business history

Abstract

This article analyses Ontario’s export-oriented cheese industry and its challenges in the second half of the nineteenth century using an ‘envirotechnical’ approach. The reorganisation of cheese production from farms to rural factories in the 1860s increased opportunities for spoilage and adulteration of milk at the same time that it made detecting and managing the same more difficult, which compelled the provincial dairymen’s associations to develop quasi-managerial roles to contend with these unanticipated challenges. The ‘problem of milk’ highlights the extent to which the rural cheese industry was an ecological and envirotechnical process rather than an entity separate from the non-human world. Ultimately this case study offers one model for combining environmental and business histories at a scale beyond the individual firm while also highlighting the relevance of the local in the development of the global food system in the late-nineteenth century.

Keywords:

• Canada
• dairymen’s associations
• envirotech
• global food system
• milk

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all of the participants of the Canadian Business and Environmental History workshop in May 2014 at the University of Toronto for their enthusiasm and suggestions, including Matthias Kipping for his thoughtful commentary on the workshop paper, and Andrew Smith and Kirsten Greer for shepherding this special issue along. I would also like to thank the various readers of earlier iterations of this article, including Michael Egan, Ken Cruikshank, Phillip Morgan, Emily Pawley, and all the participants at the 2013 Workshop for History of Environment, Agriculture, Technology and Science (WHEATS) at the University of Pennsylvania. Jason Brodeur of the Maps/GIS department at McMaster University offered invaluable advice and assistance with the map. Finally, thanks to the two anonymous reviewers whose comments greatly improved the paper.

Notes

1. Dairymen’s Association of Eastern Ontario, Annual Reports … 1893, 6.

2. Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Fourth Census, xlvii.

3. Most histories of the early cheese industry in Ontario underappreciate or minimise these issues. See McCormick, A Hundred Years; Menzies, By the Labour, 56, acknowledges the pervasive problem of adulteration but does not expand on it; Ankli, “Ontario’s Dairy Industry,” 261, mentions only that the early industry was fraught by ‘trial and error’ and does not elaborate. In the context of Quebec dairying, problems of quality have been studied by Dupré, “Regulating.”

4. My argument echoes that of a number of scholars within environmental history and beyond who have challenged the claim that industrialisation and modernisation have removed us from nature. All are careful, however, to point out that our continued relationships with non-human nature are not necessarily sustainable, benign or socially just. For example, see Cronon, “Introduction,” Nature’s Metropolis, and “The Trouble”; Pritchard and Zeller, “The Nature”; Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk; Stoll, “A Metabolism”; White, “Are you an Environmentalist,” and The Organic Machine.

5. Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk, 6–7. Similarly, see Atkins, Liquid Materialities.

6. A full account of the development of envirotech is beyond the scope of this article. See Stine and Tarr, “At the Intersection”; Jørgensen, “Not by Human Hands”; Jørgensen, Jørgensen, and Pritchard, New Natures; Russell, Allison, Finger, Brown, Balogh and Carlson, “The Nature of Power”; and Reuss and Cutcliffe, The Illusory Boundary; especially Gorman and Mendelsohn, “Where Does Nature End.”

Although one of the strengths of the approach is its broad applicability, envirotech scholarship (broadly defined) has been especially productive on matters of animals, food and agriculture. Examples include Anderson, Industrializing the Corn Belt; Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis; Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory; McShane and Tarr, The Horse in the City; Schrepfer and Scranton, Industrializing Organisms; Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk; Finger, “Trading Spaces”; and Vileisis, “Are Tomatoes Natural?”

7. Gorman and Mendelsohn, “Where Does Nature End,” 277.

8. Pritchard, Confluence, 11–13.

9. Pritchard, Confluence, 19–20. Similarly, see White, The Organic Machine.

10. As such, this article implicitly contributes to the emerging trend of decentering the firm in business history, especially in its Chandlerian form. See John, “Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents,” 192–195; Lamoreaux, Raff, and Temin, “Beyond Markets,” 409–410; and Scranton and Fridenson, Reimagining Business History, 26–29. Furthermore, the documentary record makes it impractical to analyse individual cheese factories; most were very small, changed hands frequently, and left few records.

11. Morgan, How Well Do Facts Travel?, 12–13. In particular, see the chapter by Valeriani, “Facts and Building Artefacts,” for a study of how facts travel through material artifacts. For another approach for thinking about how environmental knowledge (ecological science, in this case) is produced (and moves) across time and place, see Bocking, “Situated Yet Mobile.”

12. For a different, but complementary take on the ‘knowability’ of milk (one that emphasises laboratory work), see Atkins, Liquid Materialities, 55–90.

13. For useful overviews of the connections between distance, complexity, and global food systems, see Friedmann, “Distance and Durability”; Jackson et al., “Mobilising the Commodity Chain.” For another take on how distance can function at a local level, see Young, “Distance as a Hybrid Actor.”

14. On the gendered dynamics of the shift from farm- to factory-based cheese production in Ontario, see Cohen, “The Decline of Women,” 313–315 and Women’s Work, 93–117; Menzies, “Technology in the Craft” 295 and By the Labour, 26–32; McMurry, Transforming Rural Life, offers a gendered analysis of a parallel shift in central New York State, while Fink, “Not to Intrude,” analyses gender and dairying in nineteenth-century Denmark.

15. For more extensive but clearly articulated ‘lay’ explanations of the Cheddar cheesemaking process, see Tunick, The Science of Cheese, 21–48; Edgar, Cheddar, 39–48; Menzies, By the Labour, 69–77; Paxson, The Life of Cheese, 131–151.

16. McMurry, Transforming Rural Life, 237–238; Menzies, By the Labour, 26–32.

17. Blundel and Tregear, “From Artisans,” 709–715.

18. Harriet Friedmann first articulated the concept of food regimes in a 1987 article, “International Regimes.” Philip McMichael, who has also contributed significantly to the development of the food regime concept, offers a useful overview of the development of these ideas over time in “A Food Regime.”

19. The quotation is drawn from Sackman’s discussion of Californian orange production in “Nature’s Workshop,” 44.

20. Dairymen’s Association of Eastern Ontario, Annual Reports … 1891, 112. Merchants who sold Canadian cheeses as English would benefit from the difference in price, since English cheeses usually commanded a higher price. James Murton has described some of these paradoxical dilemmas of production and marketing in terms of Canadian, export-oriented apple producers in the early twentieth century. See Murton, “John Bull and Sons,” 232–236.

21. See Murton, Creating a Modern Countryside, for a similar vision articulated in British Columbia in the early twentieth century.

22. There is a long-standing debate amongst Canadian historians about whether wheat really was the dominant crop produced in Upper Canada (now Ontario) for the first half of the nineteenth century. I do not address that debate directly here; suffice to say that mid-century reformers believed farmers relied on wheat to their detriment. For a historiographic overview, see Russell, How Agriculture Made Canada, 96–141.

23. Kelly, “The Impact,” 64. The term ‘dairy zone’ is drawn from McMurry, Transforming Rural Life.

24. For the original articles of the CDA, see the Canadian Dairymen’s Association, Report … 1867 and 1868, 4.

25. On the institutional developments in general, see Haslett, “Factors,” 23–24; and McCormick, A Hundred Years, 144. Reformers from eastern Ontario resented the CDA’s western orientation, including its reluctance to periodically hold meetings in the eastern town of Belleville. The eastern reformers soon created the Ontario Dairymen’s Association (ODA) as an alternative. In 1874, the provincial government refused to grant financial support to two separate provincial organisations, so the CDA and the ODA briefly amalgamated as the Dairymen’s Association of Ontario (DAO) before splitting again (in 1877) into the Dairymen’s Association of Western Ontario (DAWO), and Eastern Ontario (DAEO), respectively. I use the term ‘dairymen’s associations’ broadly in this paper, and only specify which association if necessary.

26. Some factory owners established combinations or chains of small factories within a given area or region (particularly in parts of eastern Ontario), in an attempt to deter the development of competing factories while eliding the problem of shipping milk from a wide area to one central factory. See Ruddick , Drummond, English and Latimer, The Dairy Industry, 54–56; Menzies, By the Labour, 40–41.

27. Ruddick et al., The Dairy Industry, 48–49. In the first major historical study of the Canadian dairy history, J.A. Ruddick noted that most of the initial factories in Ontario were proprietary, but the ownership types varied between regions and over time. Ruddick’s claim was based largely on his personal involvement in the industry as a cheesemaker in the late-nineteenth and the country’s second Dairy Commissioner in the early twentieth. Precise statistics on the relative popularity of different types of factory organisation within the industry were not kept during this period.

28. On the organisation, function, and difficulties of these boards, see Ruddick et al., The Dairy Industry, 158; Menzies, By the Labour, 87–88; Stiles, Official History. On boards in Quebec, see Dupré, “Regulating,” 343–344.

29. Bureau of Industries, Annual Report … 1904, 44.

30. Dairymen’s Association of Eastern Ontario, Annual Report … 1888a, 51.

31. Cartwright, “Changes in the Distribution,” 225; Tosine, “Cheese Factories,” 117–118. The same general principle held in New York in the mid-nineteenth century. See DuPuis, Nature’s Perfect Food, 153.

32. I do not focus on the relationship between the rural countryside and urban growth here, but much like Cronon suggests in Nature’s Metropolis, they were mutually constituted.

33. Blanshard and Nissouri’s ability to weather competition was better than other companies, but even so they lost patrons to the competing Thorndale factory to the south in 1889. See Minutes from 11 May 1889, Minute Book 1880–1891, Box 1, Blanshard & Nissouri Cheese & Butter Factory Collection, University of Guelph Archives, Ontario. In another instance, a half dozen patrons of the Maple Leaf Cheese Company in eastern Ontario left to join the nearby (and smaller) Big Springs Cheese Factory in the 1890s. See Accounts, 1893–1900, Big Springs Cheese Factory fonds, Archives of Ontario compared to 1882 Hogs List, Account Book, File 6, Maple Leaf Cheese Co. fonds, Archives of Ontario.

34. Especially in eastern Ontario, ‘combinations’ of factories began to emerge, where individual proprietors owned a string of small factories. The largest of these operations, the Allangrove combination, was owned by D.M. MacPherson, also known as the ‘Cheese King.’ At its height, the Allangrove was a conglomerate of roughly 80 cheese factories and creameries spread across eastern Ontario and Quebec. On MacPherson generally, see MacGillivray and Ross, A History of Glengarry, 409; Menzies, “Technology in the Craft,” 299–300; Ruddick et al., The Dairy Industry, 54–58.

35. Dairymen’s Association of Ontario, Annual Reports … 1874, 41.

36. Blundel and Tregear, “From Artisans,” 715; Davis, “Cheesemaking in Britain,” 48–49.

37. On the contested definition of applied science in the Victorian era, see Gooday, “Vague and Artificial.”

38. Lampard, The Rise, 197–199, addresses this reciprocal relationship in his discussion of the Babcock tester. See also Atkins, Liquid Materialities.

39. In fact, dairy science itself was far from stable or self-evident, as Peter Atkins so ably demonstrates in Liquid Materialities.

40. Canadian Dairymen’s Association, Report … 1869, 86 and Report … 1873, 35; Dairymen’s Association of Eastern Ontario, Annual Report … 1908, 43.

41. Bocking, “Situated Yet Mobile,” in New Natures, offers an excellent study of the relationship between situated and mobile forms of ecological science.

42. Papademas and Aspri, “Dairy Pathogens,” 69.

43. Harris, The Cheese, 29.

44. Parr, Sensing Changes, has instructively examined how technologies and sensory experience shape people’s relationship to local environments.

45. Cohen, “Analysis as Border Patrol,” 71.

46. Canadian Dairymen’s Association, Report … 1869, 84–85 (emphasis in original).

47. The risk was especially high with patrons of proprietary factories or non-stockholding patrons in joint-stock enterprises, who had fewer ties to specific companies.

48. Canadian Dairymen’s Association, Report … 1871, 122.

49. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant; Nash, Inescapable Ecologies, 49–81; Valenčius, The Health of the Country.

50. Canadian Dairymen’s Association, Report … 1869, 90.

51. Canadian Dairymen’s Association, Report … 1872, 54.

52. Canadian Dairymen’s Association, Report … 1873, 63.

53. Canadian Dairymen’s Association, Report … 1871, 83–85.

54. Companies could be vague about these matters in their minutes, using language like ‘not up to standard’ or referring to patrons’ ‘delinquency’. For example, see Minutes, 21 June 1887, Minute Book 1880–1891, Box 1, Blanshard & Nissouri Cheese & Butter Factory Collection, University of Guelph Archives, Ontario.

55. Dairymen’s Association of Western Ontario, Annual Reports … 1891, 80.

56. See Atkins, Liquid Materialities, esp. chapter 6, “Moralizing Milk”; Cohen, “Analysis as Border Patrol.”

57. On whey management in the twentieth century, see Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk, 67.

58. Although chemical analysts would become increasingly important for policing the purity of milk (especially fluid milk) throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, responsibility for ensuring the authenticity of the milk supplied to cheese factories was shouldered primarily by the cheesemakers. On expertise and the shifting responsibilities for ‘policing’ honesty in dairy products, see Atkins, Liquid Materialities, 91–113; Cohen, “Analysis as Border Patrol”; and Steere-Williams, “Milking Science.”

59. Dairymen’s Association of Western Ontario, Annual Report … 1893, 211.

60. Dairymen’s Association of Ontario, Annual Report … 1874, 27.

61. Minutes of the Board of Directors, 16 January 1897 (emphasis added), Blanshard and Nissouri Cheese & Butter Factory Minute Book Vol. 2 (1891–1929), Box 1, Blanshard and Nissouri Cheese & Butter Factory Collection, University of Guelph Library, Ontario.

62. In the case of joint-stock or cooperative factories, boards of directors were usually responsible for calling patrons in to deal with adulteration or spoilage, but it was still the responsibility of the cheesemaker to flag the potential breach in the first place. Minutes of the Board of Directors, 23 June 1882, Minute and Account Book, Royal Street Cheese Factory fonds, MU 7016, Archives of Ontario.

63. Minutes from 25 August 1891 and 7 September 1891, Minute Book 1880–1891, Box 1, Blanshard & Nissouri Cheese & Butter Factory Collection, University of Guelph Archives, Ontario.

64. Dairymen’s Association of Western Ontario, Annual Report … 1891, 98.

65. 16 June 1883, Minute Books (1882–1893), Riverbank Cheese Factory fonds, Wellington County Archives, Wellington, ON.

66. An Act to Protect Butter and Cheese Manufacturers, SO 1868, CAP XXXIII. On the problems with the law, see Dairymen’s Association of Western Ontario, 1888a, 168; Menzies, By the Labour, 56.

67. The plaintiff, a patron who had been accused of skimming the cream from his milk supply, was ultimately unsuccessful in his complaint, but it nevertheless reinforced the idea, amongst many, that insinuating or claiming adulteration was a risky strategy. (The Globe, 13 August 1901).

68. Dairymen’s Association of Eastern Ontario, Annual Report … 1888a, 94.

69. Combination owner D.M. MacPherson published a short cheesemaker’s handbook in the mid-1880s that outlined his idea for a ‘time system’ of production, which was an attempt at standardising the myriad situations that a cheesemaker mind find him- or herself in. The fact that he tried to outline the best practices for using less than ideal milk testifies to how common the practice was. See MacPherson, Cheese Makers’ Manual.

70. Dairymen’s Association of Western Ontario, Annual Report … 1888a, 122; Smith-Howard, Pure and Modern Milk, 38–46, makes a similar argument about the relationship between creamery scale, competition, and the problems of cream purity in the case of butter production in the early twentieth-century US.

71. Dairymen’s Association of Eastern Ontario, Annual Report … 1893, 26.

72. Canadian Dairymen’s Association, Report … 1872, 101.

73. Canadian Dairymen’s Association, Report … 1873, 38–39. The New York dairy reformer X.A. Willard was a particularly strong supporter of Borden’s plan, and encouraged the Canadian industry to adopt it.

74. Dairymen’s Association of Western Ontario, Annual Report … 1888b, 35.

75. Eventually numerous models and variations on the lactometer flourished, but like in the UK, in the latter half of the nineteenth-century Ontario dairymen adopted the ‘Quevenne’ model as the standard. See Atkins, Liquid Materialities, 62–64. The question of whether quality was measurable in terms of fat, rather than another (or multiple) variable(s), was a contentious one, but a thorough account is beyond the scope of this paper. For a select entry into the voluminous literature on the complexities of constructing quality standards, see Atkins, Liquid Materialities, passim.; Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, esp. 114–119, 132–136; Mansfield, “Fish, Factory Trawlers”; Varty, “On Protein”; and Velkar, “Quality Standards.”

76. Harris, The Cheese, 17–19.

77. Dairymen’s Association of Western Ontario, Annual Report … 1888a, 160–167.

78. For two American examples of the debate about the lactometer and its (in)ability to identify adulterated milk and other dairy products, see Peter Atkins’s description of the court case, The People vs Daniel Schrumpf, in Liquid Materialities, 39–45; Cohen, “Analysis as Border Patrol,” as an analysis of a much-publicised instance of supposed butter adulteration in Pennsylvania in 1885.

79. Bureau of Industries, Annual Report … 1888, 107.

80. The quotation is drawn from McMurry, Transforming Rural Life, 169.

81. Draft Report, Folder 1: Select Committee re Butter & Cheese Proceedings, February 14^th, 1888–March 19^th 1888, D-18, Select Committee on Butter and Cheese No. 1, RG 49-97, Archives of Ontario. Moreover, as long as quality was defined in terms of fat content, it would do little to improve other difficulties with quality, like spoilage, bad flavours, and so on.

82. The contested debate over fat as a measure of quality was not limited to Ontario. For the English case, see Nimmo, “Auditing Nature,” 277–278.

83. An Act to Protect Against Frauds in the Supplying of Milk to Cheese or Butter Manufactories, 1888, Statutes of Ontario 1888, c 32, 51 Vic. An address by the President of the Western Dairymen’s Association adds some confusion to the narrative of events, however. He decried that the Act ‘got such a mutilation that it is almost inoperative’, referring to the fact that the section on the right of the inspector to gain access a patron’s premises for testing milk. However, since the province did not remove any sections of the text, it seems he was referring to a federal version of the Act, or to the ultra vires ruling which meant inspectors or factory representatives could be ‘hauled up as a trespasser’ if they tried to gain access to a farmer’s property, but the details are unclear. See Dairymen’s Association of Western Ontario, Annual Report … 1889, 10–11.

84. Dairymen’s Association of Eastern Ontario, Annual Report … 1888b, 119.

85. Dairymen’s Association of Eastern Ontario, Annual Report … 1888b, 94.

86. Dairymen’s Association of Eastern Ontario, Annual Report … 1893, 22.

87. Lampard, The Rise, 200–201. Lampard shared the reformers’ enthusiasm for the Babcock technology, claiming that ‘no single innovation had greater significance for factory or farm’, 197.

88. See the remarks by dairy instructor Alex McKay in Dairymen’s Association of Western Ontario, Annaul Report … 1904, 161.

89. By then, however, the export-oriented cheese industry had almost entirely collapsed, as dairy production shifted into more diversified (and domestically-oriented) production.

90. On the Dairy Industry Act of 1914 and the 1920 provincial Milk and Cream Purchase Act, see McCormick, A Hundred Years, 51, 77–78.

91. Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 113.

92. Svendsen, “Associational Autonomy,” argues that the autonomy of a dairymen’s association in Denmark was caught between a ‘logic of membership’ and a ‘logic of influence’ when it cooperated with the state in the early 1900s. This case study suggests that we might also include the contingencies of environmental pressures when considering why and how industrial associations respond in the ways they do.

93. I am thinking here of Don Mitchell’s excellent study of Mexican migrant workers in mid-twentieth century California. Mitchell situates the circulation and discipline of these workers within a broad environmental and labour analysis. See Mitchell, They Saved the Crops.

94. Rosen and Sellers, “The Nature of the Firm,” 586. See also Rosen, “The Business–Environment Connection,” 77.

95. For example, see Gorman, Redefining Efficiency; Finger, “Trading Spaces”; Jones, Routes of Power; and Rosen, “‘Knowing’ Industrial Pollution”. An (excellent) recent special issue on business in the current environmental crisis in Enterprise & Society makes the trend clear. See Rosen, “Business and Nature.”