When a company stumbles into a successful business model, it is sometimes said to have found a licence to print money.
This fanciful phrase literally came true 94 years ago in the small town of LeRoy, Sask.
A recent article on the Canada’s History website, which is run by Canada’s National History Society, recently told the story of how a fledgling cheese co-op printed its own money in order to get the venture off the ground.
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According to the story, local farmers decided in 1931 to reopen an old cheese factory.
However, this was in the depths of the Great Depression and money was tight. The co-op didn’t have any way to pay farmers for their milk until the cheese was made and sold.
They came up with the ingenious idea of printing their own scrip, which they used to buy the milk. Local businesses, including the blacksmith, the garage, farm implement dealers, the hotel and the café, agreed to accept the coupons as “money” until the cheese was sold and everyone had actual cash in their pockets.
The experiment was reportedly a resounding success and went off as planned.
They did the same thing the following year and soon the cheese bucks were being used not just in LeRoy but in other nearby communities as well.
The part of this story that I can relate to the most is when the country’s newspapers got wind of what was happening.
The headlines started out as “Coupons for Cheese Used as Currency” in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix and eventually evolved into more sensational efforts: “Rabid Finance” in the Windsor Star, “Saskatchewan Farmers Make their Own Currency” in the Vancouver Province and “Saskatchewan has Cheese Money” in the Numismatist, an American coin collecting magazine.
“One opinion piece in the Montreal Gazette even warned bankers to take careful note of what was happening in LeRoy, ‘where farmers are learning to get along without you,’ ” according to the Canada’s History story.
The LeRoy Milk Producers Association continued to print its own money until 1936, when the Dairy Pool in Saskatoon bought the factory.
The co-op disbanded in the 1960s when it could no longer compete with larger manufacturers, but the story reminds us of the ingenuity that continues to make Prairie agriculture the wonder of the world.
