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The Rural Voice, 2003-06, Page 40In the middle of the action Jim Powers, rteivlg elected to the Ontario Agricultural Hall of Fame, spent a career changing the face of Ontario agriculture Story and photo by Keith Roulston Pow`kheps busy at his Clad home he shares is s aid wife Rita.: is peaceful now in the diningroom of Jim Powers' retirement home in Point Clark but sitting talking with the quiet inductee into the Ontario Agriculture Hall of Fame brings stories flooding back of a lifetime of often chaotic times in helping birth significant Ontario farm organizations. The former secretary-fieldman for the Bruce County Federation of Agriculture and sales rep for The Co- operators insurance has been in the centre of everything from the organization of Farm Radio Forum groups to the battle for marketing boards. This lifetime of activism on behalf of farmers grew out of the restrictions of wartime agriculture when ceiling prices were imposed to keep prices from skyrocketing because of the high demand for supplying Great Britain with food. Farmers were promised floor prices to keep the bottom from dropping out of the prices in return for not getting high prices during the war but the government reneged on the promise. "Britain bought our eggs, our bacon, and cheese. They begged us to go for all-out production. We had production about three times more than we needed for our own population." About two carloads of farmers from Bruce County travelled to London for a meeting with federal agriculture minister James Gardiner about the situation Canadian farmers found themselves in with so much surplus production but came away without a satisfactory answer. They decided something had to be done. The idea was to set up some kind of marketing board, he recalls, with a committee to be set up in each township to organize things. It was about this time that Powers was hired by the Federation to help organize farmers. He looked at the Federation's budget and didn't know where the money was to come from to pay him. The answer was to turn to local municipal councils. County council gave grants to help the Federation until it 36 THE RURAL VOICE could get legislation set up under which municipalities could impose a half -mill levy on the farm taxes to support the farmers' organization. That turned out to be an arduous job because the Federation had to convince every township to impose the levy and go through the argument year after year. It wasn't until the 1970s that the Federation switched to a direct membership and not until the 1990s that that became connected .vith the farm registration. Powers had never expected to be a farmer. He'd planned to get an education and work off the farm so he'd never picked up the farming skills he would have if he expected to stay on the land. But as a teenager he contracted rheumatic fever and it damaged his heart so badly he had to drop out of school and return to the farm. The fresh air and outdoor lifestyle turned out to be the best thing for his health, and his farm organizational work brought him into the centre of so many historic happenings. When farm representatives met with Gardiner he argued that prices should be allowed to reach their own level, but that could have resulted in a year or two of low prices and crisis for farmers, Powers recalls. Farmers were suddenly getting 20 cents a dozen for eggs that had been worth 50 cents during the war. "Farmers were suffering." Lloyd Jasper was president of the Bruce County Federation of Agriculture and Powers was secretary- fieldman. "We just sat down one day and we said this is serious. If we can't do something for the farmers in this crisis when we deserve recognition, the Federation of Agriculture might as well fold up." They decided to hold a protest meeting. The federations in Bruce, Grey and Huron got together and called a meeting one wintery night at Walkerton town hall. "I remember Godfrey Schuett from Mildmay coming into the hall and telling me `You're never going to get the people in here: the cars are lined up from here to Mount Forest. You've got to get a bigger place.' "So we hired the arena and shifted the speakers from the town hall to the arena and back. People sat on the cold ice.