possesses the Great Clay Belt, containing many millions of acres of fine farming land.
About this time, the Government of Ontario was becoming interested in development in its northern territory to take advantage of the transcontinental railway bisecting the Great Clay Belt and connecting to Quebec City and the Pacific coast.
In northern Ontario in 1912, climatic conditions were declared to be 'still imperfectly known', although there was a thirteen-year record applicable at least to the eastern Great Clay Belt and adjacent Abitibi.
A demonstration farm was established at Monteith, near Matheson, in the southern arm of the Great Clay Belt, in 1908.
By comparison, the average annual precipitation in the Ontario Great Clay Belt over the period 1931-1964 was 31 inches (approximately 78 cm) (Chapman and Thomas 1968, Table 4 therein).
Good farmland was being found in the so-called Little Clay Belt, extending north and west from Lake Timiskaming, and interest was stirring over the unopened Great Clay Belt 100 km further north (500 km north of agricultural southern Ontario).
Settlement was attracted not only to the supposed arable land but also to the National Transcontinental Railway that bisected the Great Clay Belt. Gradually, farm settlement crystallized in many places along the railway through Abitibi west to the site of Kapuskasing, near where a federal government experimental farm operated for a few years, and further to Hearst.
Even the Mennonites, who chose an area in the Great Clay Belt at Reesor 50 km west of Kapuskasing in the mid-1920s, found that their usually formidable co-operative organization could only maintain their settlement for a few years beyond the Second World War.
Continuing the Great Clay Belt of Ontario (Cochrane District) towards the east was the similar expanse of post-glacial lake deposits in Abitibi.
Between the misnamed Great Clay Belt in eastern Ontario and Lake Winnipeg, there were only two or three pockets of agricultural settlement in the vast expanse of Laurentian Shield.
Escalating land prices in southern Ontario, coupled with the need for sustainable agriculture and climate change, has garnered the
Great Clay Belt region attention over the past number of years.