A brewery needs malting barley. In the 1890s, Alberta did not really grow any.
A.E. Cross had built the Calgary Brewing & Malting Company into one of the city's major industrial concerns, and it had an ingredient problem no amount of capital could solve locally. So the company did something stranger than importing barley. It imported seed barley from Ontario, handed it to Alberta farmers, and guaranteed them a return 25% above the regular market price for what they grew.
Read that as a farmer in the 1890s. Someone hands you seed for a crop you have never planted, in a province where nobody is buying it, and promises in advance to pay you a quarter over the going rate. There is almost no way to lose.
Enough of them said yes that the City of Calgary's own account credits the brewery with introducing barley growing to Alberta.
The beer travelled a long way — Calgary Export Lager shipped as far as China and Australia, though most stayed in western Canada. But the more durable export was agricultural: a crop, a supply chain, and a habit of planting that outlived the company that started it.
Alberta malting barley is a global commodity now, and the province's craft brewers build whole identities on local grain. This archive has a Local Harvest badge for exactly that. The brewery that made it possible did so by paying over the odds for a hundred and thirty years of head start.