Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 2 (2022), p. 333

In their introduction to a special rural history edition of the Canadian periodical Histoire sociale / Social History, guest editors Jodey Nurse and Ben Bradley relate how food supply issues have become a major topic of public discussion during the Covid-19 pandemic. Empty or understocked grocery shelves, long line ups of transport trucks at borders, and even closed borders have created food access anxieties unfamiliar to most Canadians. This unease will likely increase in the months ahead as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has effectively cut off two major grain producing countries from western markets. Most Canadians produce little of what they consume and are reliant upon the agribusiness system to provide them with fresh and affordable food. Nurse and Bradley argue that we should question this system, and call attention to the harm it causes to the environment, its treatment of agricultural workers, the consolation of food distribution into the hands of multinational conglomerates, and the growing divide between rural producers and urban consumers. To bolster their case, they have marshalled an impressive collection of essays to examine the historical roots of Canadian agribusiness. The essays presented examine Canada’s post-Confederation rural industries, including farming, logging, and fishing, from economic perspectives, but also from social angles, illustrating the varied influence of rural life in Canada’s past, and how it was in turn affected by broader trends. This collection is a welcome contribution to scholarship that will be of interest to rural historians around the world.

Much of post-1945 rural scholarship in Canada has focused on agricultural markets and rural modernization. Several essays here build on this foundation, and further our understanding of rural modernity and its links to industrialization. James Murton provides a long overdue re-examination of Nova Scotia’s thriving early twentieth century apple export market to Great Britain. Often hailed as an early success of industrialized farming, Murton details how the sector was still rooted in family subsistence, with orchard cultivation being only one strategy farm families pursued to remain solvent. Joshua MacFadyen similarly traces the persistence of an older forms of the rural economy, fire wood harvesting, into the modern age. While the rise of industrialization is usually linked to burning coal, MacFadyen meticulously details how wood remained a vital fuel source for homes, and even locomotives, in Ontario’s burgeoning cities. Considerable infrastructure, including railways, was designed for the shipment of wood from rural hinterlands, and its urban storage. Hayley Goodchild’s contribution looks at the rise of cheese manufacturing in the Ontarian cities. While the processing a farm product, cheesemaking was essentially industrial labour, and was affected by the same class conflicts, but here it was between cheese factory managers, their workers and dairy farmers, with the former perpetually squabbling with the latter two over wages and prices.

While several essays examine rural modernization, others highlight how rural modernity often failed to live up to its promises and was met with resistance from producers. The centralized marketing of agricultural produce through state mandated marketing boards was hailed as a great triumph of the post-war agricultural order. Where once produce scarcity and variability were common for consumers, and unreliable returns standard for producers, the new order yielded a steady supply of quality produce for shoppers, and steady and reasonable returns for farmers. But many farmers nonetheless chaffed against the marketing restriction imposed upon them, and the system often fell short of its promise of delivering quality produce to market. Bradley and Jan Hadlaw’s co-authored contribution examines the practice of ‘fruit legging’ in post-war British Columbia. Many fruit producers revolted against the authority of the BC Fruit Board to dictate where and for how much they could sell their produce by selling directly to consumers via illicit roadside fruit stands at prices they determined themselves.

Their actions are indicative of wider shifts in that accompanied growing discontent with the post-war Keynesian consensus and the rise of neo-liberalism. Nurse explores a similar phenomenon in her article detailing the ‘rotten egg scandal’ that rocked the federal Canadian Egg Marketing Agency (CEMA) in 1974 when their egg storage system was so botched that many eggs went bad before reaching market. This triggered a fierce political row that eroded public faith in organized marketing during an era of recession and inflation. A research note by Caroline Durand expands on this growing divide between producers and consumers over the course of the twentieth century. This culminated in the 1970s when the Food Prices Review Board (FPRB), a federal consumer advocacy agency, became increasingly critical of producers whom they believed were disadvantaging consumers with high costs. By century’s end many farmers were opposed to state-controlled marketing, as Laura Larsen details in her exploration of the final years of the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB). Formed in the early 1940s, at the behest of western grain producers, the CWB was the crown jewel of organized marketing in Canada, but by the 1990s it found itself at the mercy of changing ideologies. Whereas many mid-century grain farmers were populist progressives, by century’s end many were now ardent free market neo-liberals, who viewed the CWB as an obstacle to their economic freedom. This sparked a fierce debate between the CWB’s defenders and detractors, with the latter framing the argument as a moral one between freedom and tyranny. Such positions eventually won out, and lead the government of Stephen Harper to dissolve the CWB in 2011.

Rural gender relations loom large in several essays. Nurse’s examination of the ‘rotten egg scandal’ shows that it was bound up with the contemporary ‘battle of the sexes’, as CEMA’s chief opponent was a woman, Beryl Plumtree, the head of the FPRB. Plumtree believed CEMA’s policies penalized consumers, primarily suburban housewives, with high prices and dodgy quality. This gave a gendered slant to the issue, as did the fact that CEMA’s chief defender, federal Agricultural Minister Eustace Whelan, was a man, and framed his pro-CEMA stance as standing up for the livelihood of the primarily male egg farmers. Rural gender tensions were not limited to the late twentieth century. Goodchild’s essay discusses how cheesemaking went from domestic production undertaken by farm wives to an industrial activity conducted by men. In the process it became viewed as scientific and professional, making it more appealing to the masculine mind. William Knight’s essay further discusses how production was viewed as masculine, but consumption as a feminine. These attitudes affected federal efforts to entice women to purchase more fish for their families. Using government produced fish cookbooks and exhibition displays on fish cooking, the state sought to make women ‘rational consumers’ that could both strengthen Canada’s economy and improve the health of their families by purchasing and preparing quality fish products. Racism and classism also affected this campaign, as the state wanted white, middle-class housewives to avoid serving the old staple of salted fish, now associated with the poor and marginalized racial groups, and even popular dishes like fish and chips, which they linked to the working classes.

This review only scratches the surface of this issues raised in this collection. The authors of these essays remind us that no picture of Canada’s past is complete unless rural history is given proper attention. Rural history is not peripheral to the Canadian story, it is at the heart of it. The thoroughly urban country that exists today grew out of the development of rural industries and exploitation of rural resources. Modern Canadians are still reliant upon rural producers, and how the agribusiness system that emerged over the last century affects rural producers should be at the forefront of public discussion. These essays represent a fine contribution to such a discussion, and will give scholars, students, and the general public much to contemplate.