Farmers have been conduction European style cropping in Manitoba since 1812. In those two centuries the acreage of crop has grown substantially, from the one-half bushel of winter wheat seed planted in 1812 by Scottish settlers in Point Douglas, to over 13 million acres planted throughout southern Manitoba by both multi-generation and recent Canadians. It is amazing achievement, particularly considering short time frame and the battles farmers have faced along the way.

The last 200 years of cropping in Manitoba have largely paralleled the same cropping advances that have occurred in most of the developed world. Growing a Manitoba crop has gone from dependence on the hand, to horses, to machines, to chemicals, and recently to technology — who knows what the future will bring? One sure thing is that future farmers will still be battling yield robbers. The yield robbers of drought, floods, pests, all were problems 200 years ago and continue to be problems today. However frost and grasshoppers appear to be less of a problem then they were in the past.

For educators and others interested in having a quick and dirty summary of how crop farming has changed in Manitoba over the last 200 hundred years the 2008 Yield Manitoba article “Two Centuries of Battling Yield Robbers” is available to the public on line at this link: http://www.mmpp.com/mmpp.nsf/ym_2008_04_yieldrobbers.pdf . The final page of this article has a one page tabular listing that could be a useful reference for those wanting to review or discuss the changes in agriculture in Manitoba over the last 200 years.