(woman)
Manitoba was built on
agriculture and the family farm.
[fiddle pays in bright rhythm]
At the turn of the century,
agriculture was the reason
that the Manitoba
legislative building
is this huge beautiful building,
because it was booming,
we were going to be
the Chicago of the North.
[drums, guitar, & melodica
play in bright rhythm]
[woman voices
the following credits]
And the members of...
(male narrator)
200 years ago, Lord Selkirk
had a dream
of building
an agricultural community
on the cold prairies
of Manitoba.
Agriculture did become
established
and his dream was realized.
But over those 200 years,
this prairie region
would witness massive changes
in farming, business,
the makeup of society
and the role of women.
Various institutions, regulatory
agencies and exchanges
would emerge along with a series
of farmer-run organizations.
(Laura Rance) Around the turn
of the 20th century,
there was just a huge measure
of discontent
with how the grain handling
system
and the marketing system was
treating farmers.
They felt that they were
being wronged
not only on the driveway
of the elevators
that they were delivering to,
but by the Winnipeg
Grain Exchange,
which was where, in farmers'
eyes, the speculators
were being used to drive down
prices artificially.
In the late 1800s, early 1900s,
agriculture was becoming
very significant in Western
Canada, and the issue was that
producers felt that they were
bound by a couple of things.
One was they couldn't get
railcars from the railway
and that forced them to go
through the grain companies.
They would have to deliver their
grain to the grain companies
and they really felt that
on both quality and quantity,
they were not necessarily
being treated fairly.
Essentially what we had happen
was the agrarian movement
coalesced around
the common enemy
and they began to build
a structure,
they began to lobby very heavily
with the government
to get legislation in place.
There was
the Manitoba Grain Act,
which was followed
by the Canada Grain Act.
And from there you had these
farmer-owned grain companies
start to build a system
where they felt
that they should take back
grain-handling marketing
from the speculators
in Winnipeg.
And one way to do that was
by establishing cooperatives.
(Brian Hayward)
And really, it was a vehicle
for farmers at the time to take
control of their marketing
by virtue of having
their own people trading.
There was a lot of suspicion
that the markets were rigged,
that there was speculation that
was not in the interest
of farmers.
There were co-ops, the pool
organizations in particular
in Western Canada
that espoused more of
a left-of-center controlled
marketing environment.
United Grain Growers
on the other side
tended to espouse and promote
out laissez-faire
free enterprise environment
for marketing grain.
The pooling organizations were
set up in the 1920s
and they had a much more
radical, if you like,
pure and idealistic version
of co-opertism,
and they also wanted to get
around the machinations
of the grain exchange,
which they considered
to be an evil gambling game.
(Mike McAndless) Manitoba,
Saskatchewan, and Alberta,
the 3 largest food-grain
producing provinces,
actually established their own
cooperatives,
Manitoba Pool, Saskatchewan
Wheat Pool
and Alberta Wheat Pool
as a balance
against the privately-held
companies at that time.
It's like any competition,
the way it would have
provided leverage is by
giving farmers an option.
Certainly the cooperative
members
would likely deal with their own
cooperatives to offer pricing
and service alternatives
to what they had up until
that point or what they felt
they had up until that point.
They became
larger than the privately-held
companies ultimately.
(Peter Cox) It resulted
in a lot of farmers
who saw cooperation not as much
of a political movement
as just a pragmatic way
of cooperating.
(narrator)
Few individuals have had
as significant an impact
on prairie history as
Edward Alexander Partridge.
He was 6 foot tall with blue
eyes that flashed when he talked
and hands that were
constantly in motion.
He was a dreamer, an idea man.
When he talked, people listened.
He believed that farmers should
and could have more control
over their destiny
if they united.
(Dr. Paul Earl) It was a child
of the Territorial Grain Growers
Association
and more specifically,
a child of Ed Partridge,
who was very much a moving
spirit behind both the formation
of the Territorial Grain Growers
Association
and then subsequently a moving
spirit behind the creation
of the Grain Growers
Grain Company.
He and a small group
in Sintaluta started
the Territorial Association,
but Partridge had bigger plans
and a larger vision,
and he wanted to set up
a cooperative grain-handling
and marketing company as well.
(narrator)
In 1906 Partridge saw part
of his dream come alive,
but his continued butting of
heads with the Grain Exchange
led to the Grain Growers
Grain Company
losing trading privileges
at the Grain Exchange.
Obviously a matter of
belligerence
on both the part of Ed Partridge
who hated the Exchange
and on the part of the Exchange,
who wasn't that happy with him.
(narrator)
Partridge was fond of calling
the Winnipeg Grain Exchange
"A combine
with gambling hell thrown in."
The Exchange also wanted
Partridge out, no question,
and so the company replaced
Partridge as the official member
with another person
in the company.
(narrator)
Ed Partridge did not disappear.
He became editor of the
company's monthly journal,
"The Grain Growers Guide,"
often contributing
fiery articles of his own.
He authored
"The Partridge Plan,"
that called for public ownership
of grain elevators
and advocated a nationwide
overhaul of the grain business.
Because Ed Partridge was
a moving spirit
behind the Territorial
Grain Growers and was
a moving spirit behind the
Grain Growers Grain Company,
his history after that is
rather interesting,
because he stayed
on the board of directors
of the Grain Growers
Grain Company until 1912,
and then he had a falling out.
(narrator)
Tragedy was part
of Partridge's life.
He lost a leg
in a farming accident,
one of his daughters drowned,
his wife died of a heart attack,
and he lost 2 sons
in the First World War.
When Partridge left, he tried to
start up another grain company
and it failed, and then he
became an activist
and then he wrote a book called,
"Poverty"
and was active in some very
left-wing organizations, and
then sort of just disappeared
out to the West Coast,
lived with his daughter,
and then he just disappeared.
That's what happens
with radicals.
(narrator)
Farmer, teacher, businessman,
agrarian radical,
Ed Partridge died
of asphyxiation in 1931
at the age of 69,
alone in a boarding house in
Victoria, British Colombia.
His only income for a number
of years
was a monthly stipend of $75
from the United Grain Growers.
The structure of the co-ops
was always changing,
and in the 21st century,
they began to disappear.
Co-ops needed money
for capital expansion,
and as co-ops, being able to
raise that money from members
was becoming more and more
difficult.
(Dr. Paul Earl)
They had invested so long ago
and the facilities
were so far written off,
to actually build modern
facilities
was going to require a massive
injection of capital.
Throughout most
of the 20th century,
there's been a consolidation
of cooperatives,
of companies generally.
In the 1990s there was probably
the last phase of it
where the big co-ops
amalgamated,
at the time they had become
public companies even,
so they really weren't
member farmers
and operated by member farmers,
they'd become member-owned
or completely publicly traded
companies.
To a certain extent, it was
a bit of a surprise
that they all disappeared just
in terms of an approach.
They just weren't generating
enough profits in the first
place to be able to reinvest
in the capital required
to build new facilities.
And by 1919, all the co-ops
were facing severe financial
challenges.
The pools were and UGG was,
and what do we do about this?
It's ultimately the producer
that decided in the end
that there wasn't a requirement
for the sort of cooperative
style of business.
And today,
all that's really remaining
are private grain companies
and no cooperatives.
So the producer himself has
changed his requirement,
and I think that the grain
business, the agrigrain business
in Canada has changed
to meet that demand.
[banjo plays softly]
(Bob Roehle)
Well, the Wheat Board
came into being,
I guess, largely because
the 4 pools failed.
There was a Wheat Board back
in 1919 for one year
and so when the government
disbanded the original Wheat
Board, farmers weren't happy.
In their mind at least,
the Wheat Board had to do
with getting higher prices.
When they first established
the Wheat Board,
one of the reasons they needed
it or wanted it
was that Canada was a major
supplier to Britain
during the war years
and this was a way
of securing supply for that.
But the first Wheat Board
was established
after the First World War.
Governments of the day wanted
to return to the open market
and they tried to return
to the open market,
but farmers again lobbied very
heavily to have that returned,
and ultimately, the Wheat Board
did become mandatory
in the 1930s.
The government stepped in
and formed the Wheat Board
in order to handle the grain
for the farmers
and sell it on the world market.
It was felt
that because Canada was
such a large supplier
of the world markets,
we could get better prices
with a "single desk seller,"
as it was described.
(Bob Roehle)
That experiment
in their experience
made them want a Wheat Board,
and of course,
there was this underlying
egalitarian notion
that all farmers should be
treated equally
and they should get the same
price for the same quality.
And so they lobbied long and
hard, and eventually,
they got a Wheat Board in 1935.
And so that was part
of the agrarian movement,
it was an extension
of the whole notion
that we're in this together,
and we should help each other.
After the war, and as new crops
came along,
farmers began to take
a much broader interest
in what they were doing,
in the whole process
of not only production,
but also marketing,
and they discovered they could
quite readily market
their canola.
And I think as the age
of the farmer has changed,
the ones who had grown up
in the 1930s and '40s
were no longer around, the
importance of the Wheat Board
historically tended to diminish.
Then over time, over the last I
would say probably 15, 20 years
that one could see
the Wheat Board starting to lose
some of its power
for a variety of reasons.
There wasn't the same public
support for it,
farmers were better marketers.
One might also say there were
ideological issues.
(narrator)
The Canadian Wheat Board
disbanded
the single desk marketing power
on August 1, 2012.
Irrespective
of the economics, the idea
that the farmer cannot sell
his own property [laugh]
at whatever price he wants,
I find it abhorrent!
In my personal opinion, the
Wheat Board was a perfect tool.
It allowed me to market
my grain without worrying
about whether I was getting a
better price than my neighbor.
I had come
to a mental conclusion
that I would accept the average
of the year, the pool,
that was the principle
behind the pool.
I wouldn't get the high,
I wouldn't get the low,
I didn't have to worry it was
Thursday or Monday
or if my neighbor went before me
or I was ahead of my neighbor,
who got there first,
who got there last.
We got the pool price; that was
the whole term of pool meant,
it meant average,
right across the board.
I didn't have to wake up
in the morning saying,
oh, where's the market today?
[piano plays softly]
(narrator)
In the early 20th century, grain
elevators dotted the prairies
every 6 to 10 miles
or 10 to 15 kilometers apart,
a distance that was
a good day's journey
for farmer and horse
with a full load.
Probably every 10 miles there
was a grain elevator.
Nowadays, you might
go 50, 60 miles
without seeing grain-handling
facility.
Branch line network strung like
spiderwebs across the west.
In the '70s and '80s there was
a great deal
of branch line abandonment.
(narrator)
By 1930, there were 5,733 grain
elevators in Western Canada
and now, only 346
grain elevators stand.
Particularly in the grain
handling business
where you have now far fewer,
a fraction of the number
of elevators
spread across the prairies,
the farmers have to haul
long distances anyway, and if
one company gets control
over too many grain elevators
in one area, the farmer
really, for all practical
purposes, has not choice,
because he'd have to truck his
grain hundreds of kilometers.
So much is becoming not
capitalism but corporatism.
And I think that is
where the danger lies.
(narrator)
Over the past 150 years, the
role of private grain companies
has been important to the
development of Western Canada.
Winnipeg was the hub of all
of that at that time,
it was the gateway to Western
Canada,
it was a transportation center,
a distribution center,
and it was a headquarters
of the agricultural business
in Western Canada,
particularly the grain trade,
because there was thousands
of participants
in the grain trade in Canada
and hundreds of companies
involved in the grain industry
back then.
We could probably count them on
1 or 2 hands today.
We were started in 1909,
started by a 50-year-old Parrish
and a 30-year-old Heimbecker,
so I'm the 4th-generation
Parrish.
It was a bit more
of a cowboy era then.
(John Heimbecker)
The Heimbeckers were
flour millers in Ontario
around the turn of the century.
They decided that they needed to
take a much larger interest
in procuring wheat for their
flour business
and they dispatched their son,
Norman,
who was the oldest of 10
children out to Western Canada
to learn more about
the procurement of wheat.
He ran into and made friends
with W.L. Parrish, who was
already trading grain under the
name of Parrish and Lindsay.
They struck up a friendship
that obviously morphed
into something that was greater,
which became Parrish
and Heimbecker.
The founder of the business was
actually by training a tailor,
and as part of his business
back in 1857
of creating clothing for people
in that community
around Kingston, Ontario, it was
not uncommon to take payment
in the form of barter, and one
of the elements of barter
the farmers in the Kingston area
had of course,
was their production,
their grain.
So he became an owner
of grain, inadvertently,
in return for the clothing
that he was making
and he started to merchandise
that grain to be able to create
cash flow to be able to continue
doing what he was doing.
Well, he thought he was actually
pretty good
at merchandising grain
and decided
that might be a better pursuit
to him than tailoring
and that was the beginning,
the genesis of the company
and it's carried
through 5 generations to today.
(Andrew Paterson) There's been 4
generations of Patersons
involved in the grain business
in Western Canada.
Our company has marketed grain
before the Wheat Board,
with the Wheat Board,
and now again
after the Wheat Board is gone.
The company was formed
by my grandfather,
but actually my great
grandfather, H.S. Paterson,
merchandised
the first cargo of wheat
out of the Province of Manitoba.
It's surprising how many
multigenerational relationships
exist between the Richardson
family
and a number of farm families
in Western Canada
where we were doing business
built on service and trust
over the years.
The management of Parrish
and Heimbecker
are actively involved out
in the country with producers
and we still think that matters.
And the feedback that we get is
they find it amazing that
the owners of the businesses
would actually take the time
to come out to the individual
country locations,
meet with them, actually hear
their concerns, versus
having them sort of filtered
through the grain elevator
and the merchants, etc.
So we spend a lot of time to
build that communication link
and foster the growth
of the relationship.
(Laura Rance) It's been said
that if men were the pioneers,
women were the settlers.
They were the ones that created
a home out of some very,
very sparse resources they had
to work with
when people first arrived here.
And they were doing this
all the time
while they were caring for
and producing children,
which were a major source
of labor on the farm.
(Loyd Kitchig)
On the day I was born,
the thrashing crew
pulled in that morning
to start thrashing.
And Mother not only had to look
after me,
she had to feed the thrashing
gang, about a dozen men.
And one of the neighbors came
over to help her
look after feeding
the thrashing crew
and a week later she had
a baby of her own.
We had to make a living in the
'30s and mother had to help
with the milking at night
and I guess we all learned
because the men were busy
with using horses to farm
and so it was
a whole different era.
(Laura Rance)
We've seen the farm women's jobs
change over time
as all jobs
on the farm have changed,
but they're still
the home builders
and they're still feeding
the family.
In many cases today, it's the
farm wife
that leaves the farm to work
and it's her salary
that helps to support
the family.
I think it's electricity was
the bonus
that came to all rural
communities in 1947,
because we had no electricity
on the farm.
So it was the roles
would be homemaker,
and you had to make the bread
and if you did the milking,
then you had to put it through
the cream separator,
which is a horrible thing
to wash.
But Mother would print up 15
pounds of butter at a time and
send them to Deloraine and that
was the money for groceries.
(Laura Rance) As these farms
became established,
the attention very quickly
turned
towards community structures
that provided
some civilization
and social support
to what they were doing
on the land.
The women's movement
becoming very powerful
through organizations like the
Women's Institute Organization,
and many of the women who were
key players in that
were people who came
from pioneer stock.
(Gwen Parker) I met one lady
when I was working with W.I.
telling me that when she was
farming there, she would go
to a W.I. meeting 6 miles away
and she would walk with a baby
in her arms,
another one over her shoulder
and the little ones walking
for 6 miles to cross a stream
and go to that meeting
and then come home
and do the chores.
The Women's Institute
Organization, which fought,
of all things, for public
restrooms, because in that time,
women would come to town
with the family,
the men could go to the pubs,
but women weren't allowed there.
There was no place for women
and children to be,
and that was the foundation
of the restrooms.
For a lot of women, Women's
Institute was
their only contact as a group
together.
An older lady said that one
of their members came in
and she was pregnant and she had
9 children already at home.
The group gathered around her
and just cried
because family planning wasn't
legal at that time.
Cases like that,
you feel that you've been
right inside a person's heart.
Though farmers for the most part
were exempt
from military service and that
doesn't mean they didn't go,
but I think that's where one
found the women taking
a much bigger role in the
management of agriculture.
And I think when the fellas
came back after the war,
the ladies had taken over
a certain amount of doing
some of these things and I think
we find a lot of farms now
that the role played by women,
particularly women
who graduate with degrees
in agriculture,
more than half of the students
taking agriculture
at the University of Manitoba
are women.
The first woman, Dorothy Clark,
graduated in 1922.
It wasn't until 13 years later
that the second woman graduated.
And looking at the statistics,
up until the mid '60s,
from the time the college
started until the mid '60s,
there had been only 21 women
students graduate.
From the mid '90s,
two of the years
there was actually 75%
of the student body were women.
Now it's about 50/50.
(narrator)
The University of Manitoba,
from its earliest days,
had a unique way of providing
education to its citizens.
(Dawn Harris) The college at
that time had a very close
association
with the Ministry of
Agriculture,
and one of the things that it
did, starting in 1907, and it
carried on to the mid '20s,
was put out extension trains.
And these were actual trains
that went out,
there would be 2 or 3 cars
and they went out
to various communities,
and there was one
that was the Dairy Special
and it would have
the newest milking equipment,
the newest kind of technology
that was available, how you
would feed your dairy cow.
And this would be contained
in these cars,
they would attract
the local farmers,
they would come out
and gather information
or there would be a lecture
given.
There were a number
of these different trains.
They lasted into the '20s
and they stopped
at 150 different points
in Manitoba
and reached
more than 35,000 people.
So that was
the degree
of importance that was placed
on this information that was
being taken from the college
out into the countryside.
Cora Hind was a woman who came
to Western Canada
in the early 1800s.
She had come out here to work
as a school teacher
and wanted to become
a newspaper reporter.
She was originally turned down,
it was considered newspapers
were no place for women to be,
but she ultimately became
the agricultural editor
of the "Winnipeg Free Press."
And she took that job and
created a persona around herself
because of her very intuitive
ability to judge
how much the crops were
going to produce.
Every year, she traveled
across Western Canada
and looked at the crops
and wrote what she thought
that crop was going to produce
and she was remarkably
accurate in her projections.
And she was widely followed
by anyone in the world
that had an interest
in what Western Canada
was going to contribute
to the world grain trade.
She was also very active
in the Suffragette Movement
and very active in securing
social supports for women.
After fighting so hard to get
a job working in the press,
she was ultimately paid
the best compliment
she could have received
at the time.
Her colleagues reported
that the best newspaperman
in Western Canada was a woman,
and that was E. Cora Hind.
[drums & melodica
play in bright rhythm]
[woman voices
the following credits]
And the members of...
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