For the next year, this column will mark The Western Producer’s 100th anniversary by taking a deep dive every week into a past issue of the paper.
In last week’s column about the Jan. 12, 1961, issue of The Western Producer, I wrote about a war of words between prairie farm groups and the Canadian Wheat Board.
The Jan. 19, 1963, issue wasn’t any calmer, but this time it was a tussle between the farm groups themselves.
In a front page story, James Bentley of the Alberta Federation of Agriculture criticized a proposal from National Farmers Union president A.P. Gleave to merge the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and the Co-operative Union of Canada into an organization that would be parallel to the NFU.
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“To suggest such a course of action would defeat what I sincerely believe most farmers want to achieve, and this is unity in our farm organization,” Bentley said.
“Secondly, I do not believe that farmers are prepared to pay the cost of two competing national farm organizations.”
As far as I know, nothing came of the proposal, but it showed how quick farm groups were to criticize each other when opinions differed.
And that really hasn’t changed much over the years.
Cattle theft is something else that doesn’t seem to have changed much.
The Saskatchewan Farmers Union told the provincial government that “the increasing incidence of cattle rustling being reported from certain areas of the province is alarming.”
In its annual brief to the government, the organization asked that brand inspections, which covered one-third of the province, be extended to the entire province.
One issue that has pretty much been put to rest today but was starting to turn into a major concern in the 1960s was branch line abandonment.
Federal agriculture minister Alvin Hamilton said the government would act on a recommendation from the MacPherson Royal Commission on Transportation and bring in legislation that would replace piecemeal abandonment with a general plan that would look at the whole region and not one line at a time.
