Loading...
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.