Brome Township’s Sydney Arthur Fisher was Canadian minister of agriculture
Born in Montreal in 1850, Sydney Arthur Fisher bough farmland in Brome Township in 1874 and 1875. He had a degree in political economy and scientific agriculture from Trinity College in Cambridge, UK.
Fisher developed Alva Farm in Brome Township into a “showplace of scientific agriculture,” historian Anne Drummond wrote in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
Meanwhile, in 1896 Fisher became Canada’s minister of agriculture in Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier’s government, a position he held for 15 years, during which time he expanded the country’s experimental farm system. He revolutionized the marketing and transportation of Canadian produce, Drummond writes, creating subsidies for and the inspection of cold storage warehouses in major eastern centres and refrigeration facilities on steamships.
Fisher worked in the late 1890s with the United States to control disease in livestock — especially bovine tuberculosis — which included the destruction of entire herds and prohibition of the exportation of infected livestock. He helped develop a national meat inspection program in 1907. He worked to conserve farm and forest lands in southeastern Quebec.
Fisher’s interests included the registration of copyrights and he helped establish the Civil Service Commission.
Although he was unmarried and without children of his own, Fisher was interested in the education system. He supported the consolidation or rural schools, which did not go over well with the rural population.
In failing health in 1919, Fisher wrote a will creating a trust fund of $100,000 to promote agriculture and Protestant school consolidation in Brome County. He was discouraged by the continued resistance to consolidation, so he focused on strengthening Brome’s one-room schools and on prizes for agricultural fairs.
Fisher died of a heart attack in 1921 in Ottawa.