Frost, Hail, Prairie Fire and Weeds: Families Harvesting Crops on a Saskatchewan Homestead, 1872-1914
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Under the Dominion Lands Act of 1872, certain regulations needed to be met by homesteaders to ensure that they could eventually acquire title to their 160 acres of free land. This land needed to be cleared, seeded and harvested, however problems existed which threatened the successful cultivation of a homesteader’s crops. Early frosts, hail, prairie fires and weeds would destroy the plants as would pests such as grasshoppers, cutworms, and gophers. Trying to combat mosquitoes, and bulldog flies while working the fields also posed a hazard to both the homesteader and their working farm animals. Using survey data collected by the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan in the mid-1950s, this paper highlights the labour-intensive nature of farm work and the numerous difficulties faced by homesteaders and their families in their attempt to successfully produce crops.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".