Little is known of Charles A. Zavitz’s early life save for his birth in Coldstream Ontario, 1863. By the 1880s however he had left Middlesex County for the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph, Ontario. In 1887 the University of Toronto agreed to issue Bachelor of Science in Agriculture degrees to a select and competent class of O.A.C. diploma graduates. One of only five inaugural graduates Zavitz quickly secured employment at the school as the assistant superintendent of experiments.
During his first years Zavitz conducted valuable research and secured the construction of Day Hall for use as a winter workplace. In 1889 Zavitz contributed the name for the college’s student magazine, the O.A.C. Review. However, he also struggled to advance as the prominent professor Thomas Shaw took credit for much of Zavitz’s early work in expanding experimental plots. It was only in 1893 after Shaw had been removed that James Mill promoted Zavitz to head of the experimental department and the true era of Zavitz’s influence began.
Zavitz exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that year drew praise from across the continent. By 1894 Zavitz’s number of experimental plots had increased thirty-fold from five years prior. Five years later, Zavitz was the first to bring Siberian Oats and the Russian Mandscheuri Barley to Canadian growers. He carried on innovating and spreading his innovations through agricultural extension programs when he was named head of the new Field Husbandry department in 1904.
One plant of the Mandscheuri Barley was used by Zavitz to create a Barley strain known as O.A.C. 21 in 1906. Thanks to his distribution network with the Ontario Agricultural and Experimental Union Zavitz research spread quickly. By 1917 O.A.C. 21 composed the majority of barley produced in Ontario and it remained popular until 1948. Surprisingly to Zavitz, a teetotal Quaker, it also caught on as a popular malt for brewers.
Zavitz also conducted research outside of cereal crops. The O.A.C. 211 soybean strain became the first registered soybean variety in Ontario in 1925. His work was remarked on in a 1912 visit by The Farmer’s Advocate in which they declared Zavitz’s variegated variety of Alfalfa to be completely superior to comparable others.
Zavits pioneered the use of micro-sized experimental plots, sized 1/100th of an acre. The previously accepted wisdom called for a quarter acre minimum. By utilizing greater quantity to isolate the key differentiators of quality Zavitz’s method became the norm across the North American continent until after the Second World War.
During George Creelman’s frequent trips abroad Zavitz would take a position as acting president of the college. It was during one of these stretches that the First World War broke out and many schools began to offer military organizations, marches and training to students on campus. Zavitz, a pacifist Quaker, refused to allow military elements on college grounds. Zavitz attempted to resign, although Ontario Agriculture Minister James Duff would not accept his resignation. When local Conservative Party elites pushed for the government to dismiss Zavitz this motion drew backlash from farmers and farm publications across Ontario who valued Zavitz to highly to dismiss him on political grounds. When Zavitz received his honourary Doctorate of Science from the University of Toronto in 1916 the citation lauded him as a “Man of Peace.”
Zavitz finally quit the O.A.C. in 1927, and passed away in 1942. His legacy lived on in his methods and crops for decades, and elsewhere to this day. Zavitz became a founding member of both the Canadian Seed Growers Association in 1904 and the Canadian Technical Agriculturists, now the Agriculture Institute of Canada, in 1920. His name still stands on University of Guelph’s Zavitz Hall. Originally constructed for his Field Husbandry research in 1914, it now caters to a different type of experimental work, as the home of the University’s School of Fine Art.