Ey man, would greatly appreciate it if you do not be racist to Canadians. As a fellow Canadian myself and college major (doctorate) in gender/race studies, I don't remember the part of class where they said it was okay to be racist to them. Now if you're gonna be racist to someone, be racist to Lybia, who under the rule of Gaddafi has been a continuous threat to Canadian land. I personally partake in searching for Lybian internet accounts disguised under a VPN in order to continuously harass them online, to withhold the patriotism of my fellow Canadian land, then once I'm done make sweet love to the hole I cut in my Tredeau body pillow.
I know farming is hard work, but I’d be happy with my own plot doing my own thing.
Life right now is not simple and I got my dream job and I still don’t think I’ll be happy. Owning my own plot of land would be wonderful and unload a lot of anxiety.
I hear Israel is handing out free land these days - or, more accurately, will allow you to steal it from the people living there while fascist goons squads backs you up with overwhelming firepower.
You know... the way settler-colonialism has pretty much always worked.
We've thought about it, but it can be hot as hell during the summer and water shortages aren't uncommon. Given how climate change is affecting everything, it seems like a bad long term investment.
I remember when I first actually read all that small legal text for a contest where you'd win a lifetime supply of some food product.
In your mind, especially as a kid, you just imagine you have as much of it as you could ever want. Bzzt! Nope. It's like 1 free thing a month for the next 20 years. Not even technically a lifetime. 😮💨
I don't even know if seed would have been available back then year round, and for something like that "lifetime supply" would be what you used and handed out during planting season.
But seed isn't cheap, I don't think someone would have made up that story if they knew how unbelievable it was. There's no way he could just grab a 20 pound bag of seed every month. That's close to $100 today for just grass, not even crops.
And even if it was pre-tractor and done with a horse/donkey...
Most farmers would be getting them so close to perfectly straight this would have been impossible to judge.
"Seed" in 1910 was not even close to what it is today. This was also likely cereal grains and maybe some pulses. What you could buy was basically grain from the previous year.
Also the local Coop's/grain sellers would absolutely give free seed to new immigrants anyways. It was just smart business for them. The new farmers had no place else to sell the harvest but to them. More production = more money for them. A few pennies invested that yielded dollars for years.
You sorely overestimate how easy it is to get a trained animal to walk in a perfectly straight line. They do not get magical perfect-line-walking powers just because they are animals.
Seed back then would have just been unprocessed grain. I don’t know about prices in the early 1900s, but the current price of unprocessed wheat is around $230 per metric ton. That’s around $0.10/lb and would put 20 lbs at around $2 given wholesale bulk pricing.
Not even in the ballpark of the $5/lb you cite for grass seed.