In the community in which I grew up, there were those, like my father, who came to Canada when he was 16, with neither education nor skills. There were those who came from upper-class backgrounds, with education but no skills. And there were those who had both skills and education, but little scope to exercise either one.

What there was in abundance, was land, easily obtained, but challenging to make a living from, and an even greater challenge was to survive until the land was brought into production. We have very little idea, in our present pampered world, of the almost unbearable hardship of a winter spent in a sod shanty on the plains. No wonder ancient gravestones bear the faded names of wives and children who could not survive such terrible hardship.

In all the mass movements of mankind, there is always a winnowing takes place. The more hardy, the more fortunate, the more determined hang on, and the rest move on. Those who stay then begin to improve their circumstances, and a community takes shape. That community then begins to address the problems that beset them as a community, and by trial and error develop means of coping with common needs. As farmers broke up their land, the need for more of a labour force developed. This in turn, meant many more mouths to feed. And since much of the work was hard labour, farm women were faced with the need to put large meals, with plenty of meat, on the table.

Pork could be slaughtered and cured so that it would keep in the summer heat. But beef was a problem, and then as now, beef was a favourite form of protein.

I have no idea where the concept of the beef ring originated. I have no idea whether it was a widespread phenomenon or not. It was a very early and crude form of a co-operative. I only know of my own personal experience with one as a boy, and that at some point the farmers in the municipality of Strathcona, Ward 1, where I grew up, got together and talked about a beef ring. I have no firm facts about who started the idea, although I am pretty sure George Wanless would have been one of the movers and shakers. He was a close neighbour who came to the Belmont district in March 1897, and spent his first 10 years farming rented land and operating a butcher shop. He then bought the north half section of section 22, and the west half of section 23, and started to break up the land. He was an excellent stockman and in my opinion a very good all-round farmer, and since the first one of three slaughterhouses was built on his land, I am sure he played a large role in the formation of the beef ring. In fact, although I don’t have a shred of proof of the fact, I expect he performed as butcher in the early days of the beef ring, feeding not only his neighbours but his own large family as well.

The Wanless’s may have had plenty of children, but they were not unique. The country schools, which were never to be more than four miles apart, all had 20 to 40 pupils. Add to the large families many hired men, and it becomes clear that large meals were the order of the day, with a good supply of meat being essential. In summer, the prospect of a weekly supply of fresh beef was a godsend.

Somewhere, someone no doubt has a complete record of the formation and function of a beef ring. Until that record comes to light, we must conjecture. There must have been many meetings held to iron out the many facets of such a venture. How much beef could a family use? What would be the target weight of the animal to be slaughtered? How could parity in weight and quality of animal be enforced? What penalty would be incurred by not providing a quality animal when it was your turn? These and many other questions must have occupied many hours of debate.

Remember, there were no fridges or freezers, and no butcher shop able to provide the volume or variety required for such demand as existed. So at some point, all the questions had been answered, more or less, to everyone’s satisfaction, the slaughterhouse was built, a chart showing a cut-up side of beef was provided for each member, showing what they would receive over the summer, and the beef ring commenced business.

I have no idea what the target weight was. An 800-pound live animal will dress out at about 400 pounds.

A family taking a half-share, which meant they would receive half a beef in the course of the season, which might have lasted five or six months, would receive somewhere in the vicinity of 10 pounds of beef every week. Don’t be too critical of my efforts here. I’m very much going on guesswork in some of these areas.

What I know is, there was a target weight. If your animal didn’t come up to the required weight, you owed the beef ring. If it was over, they owed you. Because many farmers didn’t — or couldn’t — feed their animals in winter as well as George Wanless did, it was required that the first several animals in spring be stall fed, which meant they were given enough grain to fatten them up, so that scrawny animals didn’t get slaughtered.

I have suggested that George Wanless was very instrumental in the formation and function of the beef ring. But my own memories of it have Howard Williamson as the central figure of the ring. Of necessity, the butcher was the central figure. He it was, who must do the unpleasant work of killing and cutting up a living, sensate creature. Many of us are very fond of meat, but don’t much like the process by which we obtain it, so butchers have pretty good job security.

Where or how, Howard Williamson learned the butcher trade, I do not know. But I know that he was scrupulously honest, and meticulously clean, both necessities for the duties he assumed. He lived about four miles from the slaughterhouse on the Wanless land, and he had to go by where we lived to get there, which was a dirt road, and when it rained, he could only get there with a team of horses. But though he would go on a Friday night and butcher, dress and hang the animal and return Saturday morning, early enough to cut it up and put it in individual bags before 6 a.m., as far as I know, no one ever had to wait for him. I think many Friday nights he would have had very little sleep.

Finally, for those who, having attentively read thus far, and have wondered what the purpose of this endeavour is about, since I have displayed a lack of knowledge about many facets of the beef ring, I would refer you back to my opening remarks. A great deal of history is lost, and may never come to light. We can only celebrate what we know, and I have tried to tell, however imperfectly, what I know. Farming has changed beyond recognition, from when I was young. Farmyards have been vacated, and in many cases, been obliterated. The Wanless yard, full of life in my memory, is empty now. The big red barn is quiet, save for the rustle of an occasional rodent, the chirp of sparrows, and the sound of the wind.

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Excessive greed creates opportunity.

If a collapsing economy caused mainly by unbridled greed is not enough of a wake-up call, a trip down the grocery store aisle will do the trick. It seems perverse that even as the buying power of society in general is weakened, the cost of food is soaring. But like many other bad things in this life, greed carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. A couple of very mundane things come to mind.

I do most of the shopping. One of the things that I have consistently bought over the years is Red River Cereal, which is a mixture of wheat, rye and flax. It has not changed much over the years. It still comes in a red box with black lettering. Metric has made it into 1.35 kg, which according to my shaky metric is three pounds.

Otherwise, I think it is exactly the same cereal that my mother made on the wood-burning kitchen range so long ago. That little box of cereal now costs from $3.99 to $5. If wheat is the main component, and rye and flax make up the remainder, rye usually being a little cheaper than wheat, and flax a little more expensive, we can assume that the cost of wheat is pretty close to the mean.

A farmer with good-quality wheat will get about $7 a bushel. Since a bushel of wheat is equivalent in weight to about 20 boxes of Red River Cereal, that $7 the farmer got has now been increased in value to anywhere from $80 to $100. What value has the company added to it?

It has run the grains through a mill of some sort to crack them and then put them in the little red box, which probably didn’t cost 25 cents. All the rest is handling costs and profit. No one is producing a cheaper alternative.

I am a safety razor guy. I started shaving the down on my cheeks 65 years ago and never went back to a straight razor or forward to an electric one. Blades have increased in price over the years, but they have improved as well, so I never got too disturbed.

But the other day I went to buy my usual brand, the best known in North America, and di scovered they had competition.

My well-known brand had gone since my last purchase from $10.97 to $12.97 for 10 blades. But nestled in beside them was a brand I had never seen before – 10 plus a bonus five for $3.62.

Being at heart a reckless sort of person, always ready to take a chance, I pondered my downside for a few minutes and then thought “oh, what the heck, I’m bound to get at least 15 shaves out of them.”

So I bought them. What was my surprise when I put one in my razor and started to shave and thought, “this is better than Gil… – I mean, my old brand.”

The moral of the story is this. Somebody who knew her business saw that razor blade prices had reached the point where there was some extra candy to be had, quite a bit of extra candy in fact. And that is what causes corporations to have nightmares, and drives them to try to create virtual monopolies, to prevent the little beavers of free enterprise from getting under their voluminous skirts and gnawing those stilts that have carried them to such heights, allowing them to topple.

Excessive greed creates opportunity.

I’ll bet Red River Cereal could be produced and sold for $1.50 a box and still turn a handsome profit. And I’ll bet there are hundreds of other products out there that are equally ready to be exploited.

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“…being poor is not a watertight compartment. The relatively well off this year may be next year’s poor.”

Michael Ignatieff, the newly minted leader of the Liberal party, is on record as wanting to re-establish a political presence in the form of elected members from Western Canada. He seems to want to do this through a form of political street warfare: town by town, farm by farm, riding by riding. In the opinion of this old farmer, there is a better way. If you are in the midst of a noisy crowd and you need to get the crowd’s attention, you need to make a noise louder than the crowd’s. That is where Ignatieff should start.

There are two areas of every grain and oilseed producer’s business over which he or she has absolutely no control. One is the cost of getting the product to market. The other is the costs of the various inputs required to grow the crop in the first place. Those two areas are now completely controlled by huge transnational corporations.

Real competition

Our transportation is held hostage by CN and CPR, absolute monopolies that have carved up the business of moving freight to the exclusion of all others, with the exception of whatever trucks can move, an option that is always pricey and that becomes increasingly untenable when the price of fuel rises. What Mr. Ignatieff should do is study the feasibility of giving running rights to others on those tracks, largely built by public money and which the railways now regard as their private preserve. That would introduce true competition into transportation.

In terms of the cost of inputs, this market is also populated by a variety of huge transnational corporations. Fertilizer, chemical, seed and fuel companies present themselves as a high and impenetrable wall, with small postern doors before which farmers prostrate themselves and, at a given signal, shovel in most of whatever money they have squirrelled away in the past year. In return, farmers get metered amounts of the products they need, dribbled out to them.

Now, if these farmers are only stubborn and ignorant rustics doing what they do because they are too perverse to do anything else, and their predicament has no possible repercussion beyond themselves, then reason would dictate that they be ignored. But these farmers are the visible portion of that great, worldwide army of souls whose main reason for existence is working the soil, to participate in the miracle of growing food for themselves and others. As such, they need some protection, both for themselves and for the well-being of the rest of mankind.

Last year I paid $470 a tonne for 46-0-0 nitrogen fertilizer. Late this past summer, it was near $1,000 a tonne, mostly because farmers’ incomes had gone up. Natural gas, the main ingredient in production of nitrogen fertilizer, had not gone up that much and, indeed, has recently fallen quite dramatically, along with the price of crude oil. Fertilizer prices, meanwhile, have remained stubbornly high. Obviously fertilizer producers don’t want to give up their rich profits and they want to get whatever bit of money the farmers have left from those exceedingly brief, euphoric few months of high commodity prices. In the area of seed, research into plant breeding has almost all been taken over by transnationals and the sale of certified seed is pretty well totally controlled by corporations. Research by these entities is all oriented to their bottom lines, with little thought given to genetic diversity or long-range consequences.

All this matters because food sovereignty and food security matter. We have seen how quickly escalating food prices impact the poor of the world. But being poor is not a watertight compartment. The relatively well off this year may be next year’s poor. Today’s wealthy may be the needy in a decade. And it should be evident that we can’t leave something as important as our food supply in the hands of corporations that are siphoning off the wealth of the world and sending it into the pockets of a relatively few shareholders.

A different reception

So, how can Michael Ignatieff do anything about these things? He can start by talking to farmers about them. Trust me. A Liberal who might be given a very rough reception in a coffee shop in Western Canada talking about the price of oil or the problems of manufacturing in Central Canada would get a very different reception if he spoke about the things I’m talking about here. And he can perhaps look at enlarging the scope of the Canadian Wheat Board, so it could get into the business of inputs and transportation. What I’m talking about is a system that gives farmers some power in the marketplace, that assures food security for the larger population of our country and, beyond us, to the world.

– John Beckham is a farmer writing from Winnipeg.

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Since the CWB is a creature of the Liberal party, in Stephen Harper’s world, it must be destroyed. It has nothing to do with freedom of choice.

With a stronger minority Stephen Harper promised in his victory speech to carry out his commitments. One of those is the destruction of the Canadian Wheat Board. He will no doubt wait to see the outcome of this fall’s vote for directors of the even-numbered CWB districts, but should the vote go against him, he will not be short of other nasty and quite possibly illegal efforts to put an end to the CWB.

On the face of it, it would appear that the farm vote is quite solidly behind Harper. But does that mean farmers agree with Harper in the matter of the CWB? Time will tell.

Why does Harper hate the CWB? Only a small number of farmers want to get rid of it. He knows that it does an outstanding job for farmers in marketing and in standing up to such entities as the railroads, on behalf of farmers. He knows the returns to farmers are at least as good, and often better, than an open market would give them. Harper is no dummy. So why the zeal to eliminate the CWB?

Confrontational

One thing we can dismiss at the outset is concern for farmers. He has never sought consensus in this battle. He knows, when he says he will “walk over” those who stand in his way, he’s talking about bona fide farmers. And his election platform, while skimpy by any standard, was bereft of anything of substance for agriculture. In the opinion of this writer, Harper wants to get rid of the CWB because he is first and foremost a deregulator, in the style of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and, more recently, George Bush.

His second reason, I believe, is because he sees a threat in the CWB in that it could morph into a political rallying point against him. Do our present world conditions make deregulation and laissez-faire capitalism a popular stance for either political or financial people to take? After the most fervent pro-deregulation government in modern history resorted to a socialist-type bailout of over a trillion dollars to shore up its financial system, deregulation has taken on a bit of a bad flavour.

But against all evidence, our prime minister doesn’t seem to think so. Or does he? When France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy was in Canada, he had the opportunity to address the Quebec legislature. In his address, Sarkozy admonished Quebec separatists against trying to divide the country,

stressing that we are in a time when consolidation, not separation, should be our goal. He had barely time to close his mouth at the end of his speech before our prime minister, full of enthusiasm, almost climbed the podium in his haste to agree with Sarkozy’s comments.

So why is it good for banks, for credit unions, for countries to tighten up, to consolidate, to regulate, but a farm organization that has demonstrated that it can play with the big boys, that it can take on the railways, that it can protect quality control and raise the respect due to that quality worldwide, must be stripped of its mandate, disbanded and destroyed? What is wrong with this picture, and why are we even debating it?

Origins

The answer is Harper’s political agenda. It is Harper’s stated intention to permanently change Canada’s political complexion. He spent two years performing nothing less than character assassination on Stéphane Dion to that end.

Since the CWB is a creature, in its origins, of the Liberal party, in Stephen Harper’s world, the CWB must be destroyed. It has nothing to do with freedom of choice.

If there is a single message I would like to rivet on the minds of those few deluded souls who endlessly raise their caterwauling cry for “choice,” it would be that Stephen Harper doesn’t

care about you. To him, you’re just a dumb bunch of farmers who will vote for him regardless, and who have a perennial whine he can use in his drive to make us into a different country. He is clever, sly, willing to break the law and utterly ruthless. The country, in that inchoate wisdom that is so often seen in elections, has denied him a majority. Farmers, in their sparse numbers, didn’t have much role in that decision, either pro or con. But we can deny him a majority of yes-men at the CWB. Let us do so. It may be the most democratic thing we will ever do.

For me, it would be a wonderful thing to see the CWB in the input business. I would like to see trains with its logo have the running rights on the tracks which those monopolies that Harper likes, CN and CPR, have as their money trees. In the uncertain world in which we live, let us not get rid of something as valuable as the CWB. And don’t be lulled into thinking it can survive as one more (little) grain company.

– John Beckham is a farmer writing from Winnipeg. He does not belong to the Liberal party of Canada.

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