An environmental history of the Ontario cheese industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the origins and development of the cheese industry in rural Ontario between the 1860s and 1930s from the perspective of environmental history. Scholars have generally accepted contemporary beliefs that cheese was a “natural industry of this country” and that its growth was cooperative and inevitable. This dissertation tests these claims by comparing the rhetoric and actions of the rural elite and state officials against the human and extra-human work involved in manufacturing cheese for export, a method that has yielded new interpretations about the character and development of the industry. I build on James Murton’s concept of “alternative rural modernity” to argue that rural cheese manufacturing was a project of rural reform encouraged by elite ‘dairy reformers,’ rather than a natural development. Reformers believed cheese factories could support the social, economic and environmental stability of rural society indefinitely. Through cheese, they sought to create a society that was liberal and capitalist, but also cooperative and stable. They also believed that dairying would restore fertility to the region’s soils. In practice, however, their results were mixed. Although cheese became one of the province’s most significant export-oriented industries, transformed the environment, and deepened liberal values amongst rural people, it failed to deliver the alternative rural modernity reformers had envisioned. I provide two reasons why. First, the reformers’ mechanistic vision could not contend with the complexity and unpredictability of the socio-ecological world they sought to control. Second, the industry could not withstand the pressures of the emerging global capitalist food system and, ironically, facilitated the rise of ‘Big Dairy’ after the First World War, which hastened the industry’s demise. Overall, this dissertation emphasizes the dynamism of rural Ontario, contributes to an environmental history of liberal order in Canada, and contextualizes the resurgence of craft-based rural development in the twenty-first century.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".