Wisdom of the elders, CWB edition.

Farmers who were born out of the Depression-era have a long perspective on farming issues. A couple of my interviewees who are in their 70s weighed in on the Canadian Wheat Board. A historical perspective:

"The first generation struggled to get it established. The second generation fully understood why it was so. The third generation got the most benefit out of it. The fourth generation have no idea what the background is and don't make any effort even to try to find out or care or what. And it seems to be something in the human psyche that – are they going to have to learn all over again?"

And a comment on ideology:

"It's true, if we don't have a Wheat Board you get your freedom, but then the other people that support the Wheat Board don't have the freedom of having the benefits of a single desk that works... But the farmers think that they're going to be able to load up their trucks and take it across the border and get the premium price. But when you get down there you're going to find out that all the grain companies up here have got farmers' grain that they bought, they're down there selling too – and often times to mills that grain companies like Cargill up here own, they own the mills down there, so who do you think they're going to get it from? And the only way you can sell it to their mill is if you undersell what they're buying it from from the farmers up here. Why should they pay you more for what they can buy from the stupid farmer who sells it off-Board here? And that's the argument. They say, 'well, yeah, but I want my freedom I guess.'"

Doomed to repeat history? I wish.

Elderly people in their 70s are my favourite interviewees in my masters' research so far. Born just after the Depression into frugal families, young and idealistic during the civil rights era, farming through decades of boom and bust, these men and women have a wide perspective of agriculture in Saskatchewan. I was mining my interviews today and ran across this quote from one of them:

What the hell's wrong with this whole set-up? You know, our fathers and grandfathers would have revolted against it. And now people just don't have a thought about, you know, there's something wrong with the system.

Last summer, I read a lot about early agrarian movements on the prairies.  My favourite read was Hopkins Moorhouse's Deep Furrows*, a creative nonfiction book from 1918 about the Grain Growers Grain Company's origins with lines like "industrious little mallets were knocking away on the Xylophone of Doubt" and an unabashed bias towards the farmer activists. I found his enthusiasm to be contagious.

Agriculture here has always been capitalist - we had no peasants - and geared towards export. So I don't know how deeply our grandfathers questioned capitalism (although the Communist Party had several thousands of members here in the 1920s).**  However, there's no arguing that they effected large-scale change of a more radical nature than many in the food movement contemplate today.

In the early 1900s, when the wheat boom began and Saskatchewan saw the beginning of an immigration rush, farmers faced daunting array of organizations eager to bleed them dry. There were only two major railways, and they serviced different parts of the province. Elevator companies often owned all the elevators on a line and sometimes colluded on prices. The Winnipeg Grain Exchange was dominated by Eastern dealers and millers that farmers perceived as milking them. Federal tariffs made their agricultural products cheap for Eastern consumers and the Eastern industrial goods expensive for the farmers.

So the farmers organized. They formed the Territorial Grain Growers Association in 1901 and took legal action against a Sintaluta station agent the next year (and won). They formed the Grain Growers Grain Company in 1906 and managed, despite opposition by all the other dealers, to get a seat on the Winnipeg Grain Exchange and sell grain on a commission basis, returning profits to its farmer-investors. They formed the Wheat Pools in the 1920s, farmer-owned cooperatives that at first traded and marketed grain but became cooperative elevator companies after the 20s. Local retail co-operatives joined together in 1928 to form Federated Co-operatives Limited, which still administers over 160 co-ops in Saskatchewan today. And when farmers' lobbying pressure on politicians didn't result in desired results, they formed their own political parties. They were the nucleus of the Progressive Party which formed in 1920 and got 65 seats in the 1921 election. The United Farmers of Canada were instrumental in the the formation of the CCF in Saskatchewan (now the NDP).


All of these were collective, community-minded solutions because, as another 70 year old told me, "just like the working man, a farmer needs an organization to speak for him. By yourself you're nobody." Hopkins Moorhouse tells us that the directors of the Saskatchewan Cooperative Elevator Company in the early 1900s warned farmers that if the goal was only to produce dividends, they would “reproduce in another form the evil it was intended to destroy” and that the idea of service must be foremost in mind: their goal was to organize, educate, agitate, and socially and economically uplift farming. Their alternative system did not have generation of profit as its highest goal, social considerations be damned.

The corporate dominance of the food system in Canada today is not much different from how it was then. What is our response? We compete with each other to increase production, which drives down prices. We blame the faults of the system on individual failings - for example, if speculation wreaks havoc on prices, we say the answer is that farmers must learn to hedge. We accept the status quo as natural, even common sense. We think that we are taking action by buying something - "voting with our dollar"- without recognizing how the limited choices have been set out for us. Only 61% of us vote and those who don't likely aren't engaging in action to either change or make obselete the political system that they deem irrelevant or unimportant. We are kept in constant fear of national and personal financial insecurity and told that circling the wagons, excluding others, and getting what we can for ourselves is the way to stave off doom.

Well, I've worked myself into a funk. I'll post something more positive in a few days, but for right now, does anyone have any examples of some positive movement?

* Subtitled: Which Tells of Pioneer Trails Along Which the Farmers of Western Canada Fought Their Way to Great Achievements in Co-Operation

** I am compelled to write this geeky footnote: They were likely more Narodist than Lenin would have liked (although he would have expected no different).

Reframing the Debate

I've had more than a few experiences that show that it's pretty difficult to get people to 'think outside the box'. I used to enjoy trying when I taught high school, but it seems to me that the students were more receptive than many of the adults I run across.

In response to my post "Ugliness", a discussion on another forum resulted. It began with the question, "Does this person understand it costs money to produce food". My response: "Of course I know it takes money to produce food in high-input Saskatchewan agriculture; I come from a conventional farm background. But if you think about it, it doesn't take money to produce food. It takes land, seeds, and water. Under capitalism, you need money for these things, but in many other systems, you don't - water, for example, often falls from the sky, and seeds come from plants, not Monsanto. The idea of buying and selling land is also historically recent. Until someone takes them from you and charges you for them, you don't have to pay money for these things. In other words, there is room to question the system that usually goes unquestioned, and I think it is necessary that we do so."

Well, that sure didn't work. The followup question was, "Who pays for the land, equipment and labour required to produce food?"


If I wanted to accept the questioner's premise that we have to deal with the system we're in, I could respond that there are many options, such as communit-based financing, machinery coops, community land trusts, or government funding such as with the Land Bank. But I was trying to reframe the question.

I once gave a twenty-minute presentation based on the idea that land should be decommodified, just to have someone ask at the end why I thought farming should be different from any other business. I was so flabbergasted that I started my response with "You seem to have missed the entire point of my presentation." I try not to give into the temptation to be plainspoken, but occasionally succumb. However, I have nothing on Coline Serreau.

A Globe and Mail food reporter interviewed her on her film about food production, Local Solutions for a Global Myth. Some excerpts:

 The experts and activists you interview say the big problem with agriculture today is that it focuses on making profit, not food. Is there a way to make both?  

To make both? What do you mean? We have to get out of this system, and profit is not the aim. Ever. It should never be the aim. Period. Profit has nothing to do with happiness. So if food is linked to profit, food is going to be bad.  

Do you think farmers can be convinced to grow food without profit though? 

It’s not without profits. They will have to make an honest, good living. It’s the whole system that has to be changed. It’s not about the farmers. If you make organic food, you’re not allowed to use the seeds that are produced by the right people [i.e. seeds that are not officially registered]. The whole system, it’s messed up, you know? So the people, they cannot make profit and do good things at the same time. You have 15 per cent of the big farmers who make all the big profit, but the others are ruined. Have you heard of agricultures? Have you heard of agricultures that have been ruined? Do you know it’s, like, millions of people affected? Why do you ask me those questions? I think you are – are you not aware?  

I think it’s a legitimate question. Because how would you be able to …
I wouldn’t be able. It’s the system. If you stop giving money to the people who put crap in the food, they won’t be able to put crap any more. They put it in because they get money from it, because they want to give money to the multinationals who produce the crap. It’s very well explained in the movie.

I wish I were French.

Homespun Wisdom

In December, I was very fortunate to interview an amazing 69-year-old farmer from Manitoba with an incredible knack for turning a phrase. Fred is erudite and down-to-earth, humourous and sober, gentle and passionate. You can hear an interview with him on Shaking the Tree Radio, but these quotes are from my interview with him. We talked about the demise of the family farm, the loss of rural communities, the future of agriculture, and public consciousness. Fred explained how the logic of the capitalist marketplace means that wealth and knowledge are transferred out of rural areas into the hands of monopolistic corporations as citizens' democratic control over the economy weakens.

"I remember when my dad first sprayed a field for yellow mustard. This was such a novelty I rode on the tractor with him to watch him apply 24D to a field, which now is total lunacy. But all of a sudden it changed the way we farm.It created a dependency where the benefit of the technology was all captured by the price of the technology. And then because prior to that the knowledge was passed from generation to generation when I was probably at maybe preschool I can remember my grandfather taking me by the hand and showing me things. You see, that was that intergenerational transfer of agricultural knowledge that goes back right to the Euphrates valley 10000 years ago. All that linkage and all of a sudden, when my dad hooked on that sprayer, that knowledge was not important anymore...The transfer of knowledge from community to a place where community rents and buys knowledge from a knowledge supplier is not a sustainable system."

Fred contrasted our situation on the Prairies to the situation he saw in the Philippines a decade ago, where politicians were eager to embrace - and to force people to adapt to - the industrial farming that we model, with all the losses that would entail.

"There's another thing that I didn't realize we'd lost until I'd done that trip to the Philippines. In the evening, because of their poverty to a degree, the community there functioned as a community. They got together, and adults sat around talking about the problems of agriculture. Which never ends, it's universal. And on the outside of the circle, the children were sitting listening in. I thought, “I've been there.” But it's a long time ago, and we don't have that anymore. We come in off the long day and we turn on the idiot box or we pick up the paper and the nodding heads and the golden hands direct the conversation. Because you know, it's got to a degree that a lot of people in social circles think that it's impolite to initiate a conversation about the social and economic problems of our community. They just want you to go away, don't bother me with that. I want to turn on something like Dancing With the Stars. And there I get to participate 'cause I can vote! That's democracy!"

And finally, on community:

"I always look towards the collective way to do things, because I desire my neighbour more than his land. Because without my neighbour, the land isn't much good to me, because an agricultural desert is not the place I want to live."