![One must remember that back [during World War II], The Western Producer might have been the only newspaper read on the farm. There was news on the radio, but if the Producer wasn’t informing isolated rural residents about the latest war developments, there was a good chance they wouldn’t know about them. | Bruce Dyck photo](https://static.producer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/25161654/11-Oct-26-IMG_0385.jpg)
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.
It can be a surprise for modern readers of The Western Producer to scan issues of the paper from the first half of the 1940s and see all the news about the Second World War.
Today, we stick to agricultural news and wouldn’t dream of publishing a front page story on the latest troop movements in the Russia-Ukraine war.
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However, one must remember that back then, The Western Producer might have been the only newspaper read on the farm. There was news on the radio, but if the Producer wasn’t informing isolated rural residents about the latest war developments, there was a good chance they wouldn’t know about them.
Thus, the big headline on the front page of the Oct. 23, 1941, issue was, “Battle Raging Near Moscow – Stalin Commands Defence.”
There were also stories about the Royal Air Force conducting cross channel raids and the assassination of a German general in Nantes, France.
The big agricultural story was about the federal government bringing in wage and price controls under the War Measures Act to halt inflation. The move froze all prices and prohibited any increase in basic wage rates except with government permission.
Farmers were not amused.
Acreage bonuses and freight rate subsidies “are poor compensation for the injustice of the many-times-more vital economic inequality clamped down on farmers in this price-fixing scheme,” thundered H.H. Hannam, president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture.
As well, a debate broke out on the front page between federal agriculture minister James Gardiner, who defended Ottawa’s decision to make payments to farmers on an acreage basis rather than a bushel basis, and former Saskatchewan Wheat Pool president J.H. Wesson, who was having none of it.
Readers also received practical advice, such as M.J. McPhail of the Melfort experimental farm urging livestock producers to make sure their barns weren’t too warm in winter so the animals wouldn’t experience a “severe shock” when leaving their cozy environs in the morning for the frosty outdoors.
