It was the 16th of June, exactly 70 years ago, when a weary farmer named Alex McPhail jotted in his diary, “Wheat Pool over the top today.” Those six simple words marked the end of an intense year of organizing and campaigning that resulted in 45,725 Saskatchewan farmers – more than half of all farmers in the province – signing contracts pledging to market all their wheat through the Pool for five years.
Ten days later, the provisional directors formally declared contract pooling in operation, and soon thereafter McPhail became the Pool’s first elected president.
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With the successful launch of Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, orderly marketing of wheat was secured across the Prairies. Alberta Pool had started operations the previous fall, and Manitoba Pool in spring 1924. Both had gone ahead even though their initial sign-up campaigns attracted less than half of the farmers in each province. The solid Saskatchewan success in gaining the support of a majority of producers cemented the alliance that became known as the Canadian Wheat Pool.
Although the Depression drove the pools out of pooling, their orderly marketing role was ultimately carried on by the Canadian Wheat Board.
There’s a lot of reason for farmers to feel proud of what they and their parents and grandparents did during those seven decades, but it’s also useful to remember that none of it came easy. There were disasters and setbacks of every kind.
By most accounts, the pools and farmers in general went though crises and problems that were far worse than the stresses of recent years.
They survived those crises and prospered, but it wasn’t because farmers of that era were all solidly united. There was as much or more dissension, vehement argument and political rivalry in the 1920s and 1930s as there is today. Within the early Saskatchewan Pool, there was a virtual civil war between delegates from the Saskatchewan Grain Growers and from the Farmers’ Union. Running an agricultural co-op was no tea party.
If they had waited for complete consensus, nothing would have been done. Instead, different groups argued and lobbied strongly for their positions, then respected the majority’s democratic decision and kept working together to build their co-operative.
Minority groups who lost a vote did not run away to form splinter groups, nor set up competing local facilities, nor lobby politicians to try to over-rule the majority. The majority, meanwhile, respected the right to dissent and tried to accommodate dissenting views.
That, of course, was a different generation of farmers. Could today’s generation do as well? Will they?
