The Rural Voice, 1983-01, Page 44Wishing you moments of beauty
and pleasure today .... and
moments to treasure tomorrow.
Thank you for your patronage in
1982.
We will look forward to serving
you in 1983.
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
►
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
AGRE FARMS
LIMITED
R.R. 1, B1uevale 335-3093
Specialists in crop sprays and sprayers.
Is your portable
Grinder Mixer leaving
you out in the
cold? Don't punish
yourself for another
winter. Let us show
you how a
Farmatic Hammer
Mill or
Roller Mill will keep(
l'
you warm and save
you $ $ $.
CaII us for
a free estimate
ATWOOD ELECTRIC
Atwood - 356-2304
Harriston - 338-2182
PG. 44 THE RURAL VOICE, JANUARY 1983
KEITH ROULSTON
DECLINING PIECE
OF THE ACTION
Doing some renovation recently yielded a copy of the long -
forgotten Canadian Countryman farm magazine and that, in turn
yielded some interesting perspectives on the history of our socie-
ty and farming, particular in the last 40 years.
The magazine was dated Oct. 31, 1942, in the heart of World
War II. Among the ads for Victory Bonds and the articles about
allocations of scarce farm machinery parts and fuel, there was a
major article based on the book Underneath It all by W.H. Moore,
a Member of Parliament.
The author talks about the existence of "closed shops beside
open fields." He writes: " Whatever regulations, therefore, tend to
increase those urban wages and profits beyond what they other-
wise would be, tend to enable the town to purchase, with a
smaller quantity of its labour of the country. The price which the
town really pays for the provisions and materials annually im-
ported into it is the quantity of manufacturers and other goods
annually exported from it. The dearer the latter are sold, the
cheaper the former are bought.The industry of the town becomes
more and that of the country Tess advantageous."
Mr. Moore was accurately predicting, in this part of his book at
least, the future of our society and agriculture's place in it. The ur-
ban union movement began late in the last century as a badly
needed reaction against maltreatment of industrial workers.
Once the initial mistreatment of workers had been righted,
however, the union movement became an instrument for the
redistribution of wealth. The workers of people like Henry Ford
and the Rockefellers saw the immense wealth accumulated by
their bosses and rightly felt they were entitled to a little more of
the profits of the businesses they kept going.
The only way they were able to get the strength to win the bat-
tles against powerful industrialists was to get government
legislation such as the closed shop which meant that everyone
who worked in a factory must belong to the union. It meant either
you went along with the union or you didn't work.
Well, the workers got a bigger piece of the pie but it wasn't the
rich who paid the price but the unorganized parts of society. More
wealth was shifted to the urban portion of society and agriculture
was put on a downhill slide that has seen fewer and fewer farmers
able to stick to the land every year since the end of World War II.
The thing that our society, leaders and ordinary people both,
seem to be unable to understand is that we live in a finite world.
There is only so much of everything to go around; so much air, so
much water, so much good soil, so much oil and in truth, so much
money.
Thus we have seen more and more money shifted to urban
populations who have know-how to martial the necessary
economic and political clout to get it. Autoworkers,
longshoremen, steelworkers, railway men, even teachers, doctors
and policemen have learned how to unite, to show the clout
necessary to get themselves a larger piece of the pie. Only those
who didn't have unity, who had no way to fight back, have suf-
fered.
Number one victim of course has been the whole farm com-
munity. Farmers have tried to combat their declining piece of the
action by getting bigger and more "efficient", by using more
machinery, more chemicals and thus creating more high-priced
urban jobs.
Finally some branches of farming realized what Mr. Moore had
said back in 1942: that "open fields" cannot exist beside "closed
shops". Their solution was to "close" the fields too, to come up
with marketing boards that set quotas. That in turn has left other
farmers, those without powerful marketing boards, to suffer get-
ting a smaller and smaller piece of the pie.
And what we've got is what Mr. Moore predicted: less and less
freedom all round. Ain't progress great.