1446 THEISLAND ACADIANS

part of the payments, and in 1889 they also included wheat and sometimes barley. In that year the average contribution, Dominique Gallant’s for instance, included twelve bushels of potatoes, five bushels of oats, two bushels of wheat and one bushel of barley’*'.

In Abram’s Village in 1880, the Honourable Joseph-Octave Arse- nault, merchant and politician, paid farmers 38 cents a bushel for a large quantity of oats, and likewise for potatoes’. In 1887, the Evangéline reported that the yield of oats was quite high and of good quality in Abram’s Village but that the price was only around 25 to 27 cents a bushel, while potatoes were fetching between 25 and 30 cents a bushel’’. .

One distinctive crop grown by Acadian farmers was flax. In fact, this plant was grown very little on the Island outside the Acadian communities. Flax filled various household needs: it was used to make sheets, towels, curtains and clothing’**. There was no mill on the Island for the treatment of flax, so all the procedures for making linen were carried out on the farm’.

The census of 1881 shows clearly that the Acadians took a special interest in growing corn. However, production was small-scale and probably only for home consumption’.

LIVESTOCK

A common complaint in the newspapers of the time was that farmers kept too many animals for the amount of feed available. As in the past, most farmers continued to winter their cattle on straw, for lack of anything better. Nevertheless, there was a marked increase in livestock numbers during this period.

There is little information on the Island Acadian farmers’ livestock for this period. According to the historian Andrew Hill Clark, compared to other Island farmers at the beginning of the 1860s, the Acadians raised fewer cattle’’’. One might assume that they were more interested in growing cereals as evidenced by their desire to establish granaries. Livestock would thus be kept mainly for domestic needs.

For the Island as a whole cattle numbers almost doubled in the space of ten years, i.e. between 1871 and 1881'*. The more prosperous farmers made an effort to improve their breeding stock. Their slogan was: “The Scrub must go!” In fact, the more perspicacious recom-