As three past Saskatchewan Wheat Pool presidents reflect on a combined 33 years of leadership, one word sum up their decades of pool rule – diversification.
Charles Gibbings was the first of a series of pool leaders to take the grain handling giant in new directions, by starting the pool’s farm supply and fertilizer businesses and livestock division.
“It was straight grain handling previously,” said Gibbings, who is now retired and living in Kelowna, B.C.
“We got into a number of things that were different, but all within the confines of the broad goal of improving the economic and living conditions of people on the farm,” said the man who was the pool’s elected president from 1960 to 1969.
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Sask Pool, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, has had seven presidents since 1924. Gibbings, Ted Turner and Garf Stevenson are the only three surviving, other than current president Leroy Larsen.
Gibbings is a little confounded by the pool of the 1990s.
“I don’t understand it,” said the 82-year old during a phone interview. He thinks the pool has diversified too far, spread itself too thin.
He remembers looking at some placemats the last time he was at the pool’s head office in Regina. They were plastered with the names and logos of the pool’s subsidiaries, but the identity of the pool itself was nowhere to be found.
“I didn’t know what they were,” said Gibbings, referring to the logos. “When I found out what they were I wondered why they were there.”
Turner took over from Gibbings during a period of growth for the pool. He admired how Gibbings had taken the grain company from a comfortable situation into a riskier environment and decided to take the co-operative down a similar path.
During his 18-year run as president, 1969-1987, the pool was involved in a “fabulous amount of commercial activity.” None was more important than the $90 million purchase of Federal Grain Ltd. in 1972. Outside the pools, Federal Grain was the largest Canadian grain company. In one fell swoop the pool went from handling 50 percent of the province’s grain to well over 60 percent, said Turner.
During his tenure, the farm services division was expanded as were Western Co-operative Fertilizers and the pool’s livestock marketing facilities.
But perhaps his most visible act as president was a contraction rather than an expansion. During his term the co-op’s elevator network shrank from 1,200 facilities in 1969 to 590 by the time he resigned. He also consolidated a number of the pool’s facilities in Thunder Bay, Ont.
Turner, 72, sits on the board of directors of two agricultural companies, Bioriginal Food and Science Corp. and Genex Swine Group.
He led the pool through several stormy political debates, most notably the battles of the early 1980s over the Crow rate transportation subsidy.
“That was probably the heaviest of all the public policy debates.”
Like Turner, Stevenson believed the pool should speak out loud and often on grain and transportation policy.
“We were really active in farm policy during my stay there,” said the man who led the pool from 1987 to 1993.
When he looks at today’s pool he is concerned about the corporation’s diminished role as a speaker for Saskatchewan farmers.
When he was president, farmer loyalty and policy were two reasons young farmers joined the co-operative, he said.
“I guess I’m concerned about that lack of connection for the young farmer of today.”
During Stevenson’s tenure the co-op continued to diversify its business and rationalize its elevator system, closing 20 to 40 wooden elevators a year. But the pool also began building and buying large concrete inland terminals, which were to become both economical and controversial.
The purchase of the Elders Grain Company Ltd. terminal in Moose Jaw and the Northern Sales Co. Ltd. terminal in Saskatoon were major coups for the pool during his time as president, said Stevenson, 72, from his home in Regina.
“Many times afterwards we said, had (those terminals) fallen into the hands of some other multinationals it would have certainly made the pool scramble.”
Stevenson, now chair of the Regina Health District and on SaskTel’s board of directors, said he most fondly remembers the time he spent talking to members.
“I could almost go into any elevator across the province and they’d call me by my first name. Everybody didn’t agree with me, but they knew me.”
Sask Pool is marking its 75th year in business this year with a homecoming celebration and barn dance in Regina on June 26.
