Excerpt from Interview on CBC Morningside
June 18, 1993:
50th ANNIVERSARY of the FARM RADIO FORUM
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CBC INTERVIEWER:
This year is the 50th anniversary of the Farm Radio Forum, and founders and
farmers are getting together this weekend in Blythe, Ontario to celebrate.
I’ll talk to one of them in a moment, but first, here’s what it sounded like
on Monday night, November 2nd, in 1942:
"This is National Farm Radio Forum.
[Song]
Men of the soil
Men of the soil
Men of the soil
We have laboured unending
We have fed the world upon the grain that we have grown
Now is the start of the new day ascending
Giants of the earth at last, we rise to claim our own
Justice throughout the land…
[Song trails off]
This is the first in the fall series of broadcasts directed to listening groups in rural Canada. In this the fourth year of war, we hear more and more that it is a "people’s war" we are fighting.
What do you and I mean when we say it is a people’s war? Do we mean it is the people’s job to fight blindly? Are we clear about the issues at stake in the war? Do we know what caused it? If we don’t, then how can we expect to prevent the same thing from happening again?
Thousands of farm people are gathered tonight to better their understanding of the farmer’s place in the people’s war. Let us then for a few minutes join a Canadian father and son as they discuss these issues. The father is a typical middle-aged farmer…"
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INTERVIEWER: The Farm Radio Forum broadcast from November 2, 1942.
Simon Halaghan was a long-time member of a Farm Radio Forum near Blythe, Ontario, and he’s on the line now from his farm there. Mr. Hallaghan, good morning to you.
SIMON: Good morning.
INTERVIEWER: Did that bring back memories for you?
SIMON: It sure did, it sure did.
INTERVIEWER: What was the scene like… Did you have the Farm Radio Forums in your house?
SIMON: Oh yes, several times, several times. There was this young woman in our community at that time who was very interested in the Farm Radio Forum organization. And she approached me –I was quite active in the Ontario Federation of Agriculture at that time-- to start a Radio Forum in our community. We had called out a meeting and we organized the start of the Farm Radio Forum…
INTERVIEWER: How many people were involved in yours…?
SIMON: At that meeting, there might have been about seven or eight. There was no problem getting an organization, and at our Farm Forum meeting, of course, we would listen to a report on a topic from the head office. And then we would form small groups… And it was the greatest educational program for adult education that you could find any place. And in those small groups, there would be maybe five or six people, and they would discuss the topic intelligently, each one expressing their own opinion, and they got away from state fear, and they were able to express themselves and their opinion. Then we’d go to the kitchen, and we’d have open discussion there, and we would generally always able to come up with a solution to better our situation in the community and make a better community for the people to live in. It was a great thing to bring the people together… And we increased that way and there were many things we came up with to help things out. We used to bring in special speakers, maybe from the bank or maybe a Member of Parliament. One item we discussed… --there was a great market for cheese during the war at that time-- we thought it might be a good idea to start a cheese factory. We organized a committee to start a cheese factory in Blythe, by about the first month in the year ’45… and to tell you how the Radio Forums had united our community in such a way that we made our first batch of cheese on the 16th of July in Blythe, so you can see what the Farm Radio Forum people had done to unit the community.
INTERVIEWER: Mr. Hallaghan, I have a neighbour of yours here on the other line who was the National Secretary of the Farm Radio Forum. He’s in Ottawa today, but Roger Schwass can hear you… Maybe you’d like to say hello to him!
SIMON: Well, hello Roger
ROGER: How are you, Simon? I haven’t talked to you in years.
SIMON: Well, by golly, I think of you so often when you were in Wingham…
ROGER: It’s getting to be a long time ago!
SIMON: Well, that is quite awhile ago.
INTERVIEWER: You have farms near one another, do you?
ROGER: Well, we’re 30 or 40 miles apart.
SIMON: Oh yes. Where are you now, Roger?
ROGER: Up in Bruce County we have a farm, but right now I’m sitting in Ottawa at the moment.
INTERVIEWER: Mr. Hallaghan, thank you so much for sharing your memories with us this morning. Goodbye.
SIMON: Goodbye, then.
INTERVIEWER: Simon Hallaghan is a farmer near Blythe, Ontario, and Roger Schwass has studied Farm Radio Forum, and as I mentioned a moment ago, he used to be the National Secretary, and as he mentioned a moment ago, he is in Ottawa this morning . –Good morning!
ROGER: Good morning.
INTERVIEWER: Hearing that broadcast again must have brought back memories for you, too.
ROGER: It certainly did because I was a very small boy in those days in the forties, but I remember Farm Forum in our community in Bruce County, where they met in the local school. And the group would be a bit bigger, I think about 30, but it had a tremendous role in that community, in drawing it together, and as Simon Hallaghan has just said, in launching projects which could help the community recover from the Depression and also make its way in an environment during the war which was very difficult for farmers, because farm prices, as you know, were frozen, and the rationing process very much distorted the prices that farmers got.
INTERVIEWER: I want to talk to you about the way it was organized and so on, but you mentioned the projects that people got involved in. Mr. Hallaghan mentioned the cheese factory –do you know if it’s still going?
ROGER: I’m not sure about that cheese factory because the cheese industry really changed dramatically during the fifties, and either the plants were consolidated into very large plants related to multinational corporations, or the business shifted to skim milk powder, which could be packaged and shipped overseas.
INTERVIEWER: Right. A lot of the projects that were started though, did …in fact, have thrived and turned into great big businesses. I’m thinking of Co-operators Insurance. What else?
ROGER: A tremendous number of projects were started, which led to, well… hundreds of co-operatives were created at the local level, hundreds of credit unions which still operate, the Co-operators Insurance you’ve mentioned. But United Co-operatives of Ontario was essentially started during that same period, at least, and Leonard Harmon, who is the long-time president of it, was the Secretary of Farm Radio Forum, I think, in about 1942.
INTERVIEWER: Let’s go back to the way it was set up, and particularly the topics that were chosen. And I’m interested in knowing how they came up with the topic that, for example, would grab an apple grower in BC as well as a hog farmer in Ontario.
ROGER: Well, it was extremely difficult to do that, and there was an elaborate feedback process. The thing also occurred in a period when there were very few sources of entertainment in the rural community, and you didn’t have competition from television, for example. The farmers would listen to the broadcast, they’d study the study guides, they’d have their discussion, they’d make recommendations which could be sent up the Ministers of Agriculture or Education at the provincial level, and these were aggregated into a report that was taken to the federal Ministers. And, very often, there’d be direct feedback to those clubs the following week. And so, there was a continuing process of an elaboration of their ideas –it was an early form of "polling", really, and it gave the farmers a sense of being directly in touch with the centres of power in the country.
INTERVIEWER: They had to really put time and effort into it… You mention a study guide. So I gather there was a package of background material that arrived that people had to study and think about before they listened to the show?
ROGER: That’s right. It was about 4,000 words in length, it was fairly complicated. It tried to illustrate the issue right across the country and even in terms of global pressures at that time. But it also tried to link that to community activities that they could undertake.
INTERVIEWER: Can you give me some examples of topics that were tackled?
ROGER: Well, there were a tremendous range of topics –rural education, of course, was a major one, because the one-room country schools at that time were perceived to be "not adequate" and Farm Forums had a great deal to do with –at least in Ontario—with the consolidation of those schools into township area schools, which was accomplished in the late ‘40s and mid-‘50s. Those schools were much more complete –they had recreation facilities, they had a tremendous amount of opportunity with auditoria and so on where local plays could be developed and presented, and they represented a major cultural step forward for rural communities.
INTERVIEWER: Now, in the snippet we heard, the war was the topic. That must have been often the case in the years around that time?
ROGER: Well, certainly, the Farm Forums in the ‘40s were very much preoccupied with the war effort, which involved farmers producing a great deal more food than they would normally do –the market was wide open. The problem was the price was frozen at levels fixed in about 1940, and costs of production, even then, were rising quite quickly. So the farmers found themselves in a kind of "trap" in which they were expected to produce more at the same price but with rising cost, with their margin of profit falling. And farm machinery, during the war, was not available, because the farm machinery companies were producing tanks and other kinds of equipment.
INTERVIEWER: Hmmm. Can we talk a little about the history of the Forum? Whose idea was it?
ROGER: Well, the Farm Forum in Canada grew out of that tremendous Depression. To back to the very roots of it, you go back to the 1840’s when the people who came to settle Ontario from Scotland, and Ireland and England brought with them the Mechanics Institutes, which were institutes, in those countries, set up within the emerging industrial society to help people educate themselves throughout their life. The local libraries were set up in the same kind of education framework where people continued, if they could became literate as children, they worked in the mills from the age of 8 or 9, but they continued their education throughout their life. So this tradition came to Canada. The Grange Movement came up from the United States, and it was a self-improvement system for farmers –the "National Grange" it was called in the States—and you’ll still see Grange Halls in a few communities. That led to an emergence of various farm organizations which all had self-improvement as their objective in the 1860’s and ‘70’s. And that led, in turn, by the 1920’s of course, …in the period around 1900 to the emergence of the wheat pools in western Canada and some of the big co-operatives, and to farm political organizations in the ‘20’s. Then the Depression came, the whole thing fell apart, and you had a new cycle in which the Young Canada movement was created, the CCF was created in Regina, you had extension services set up in all the universities to work with rural people, and that was where Farm Forum came from. It came out of the Antigonish movement in Nova Scotia…
INTERVIEWER: --where the fishermen were basically taught how they could control their own lives and prices and so on…
ROGER: That’s right –Father Coady and Father Tomkin started the Antigonish movement in the ‘20s and ‘30s to help the fishermen, people of Cape Breton and PEI. Then Alex Sim at Macdonald College pioneered Farm Forum really in about 1939 in the eastern townships. But it went national by 1941 or ‘2.
INTERVIEWER: I understand with the Federation of Agriculture and the CBC as partners in it.
ROGER: That’s right.
INTERVIEWER: Now, are there any pioneers from all those wonderful years of radio you’d like to remember, maybe one in particular?… We’re running out of time a wee bit…
ROGER: Well, Dr, Corbet, Dr. E.A. Corbet, who I haven’t mentioned, was the man at the University of Alberta extension department who set up the Banff Centre, for example, in 1935, the Canadian Association for Adult Education in 1936. And that, in turn, was part of a sort of web in relationships that included the CBC, the National Film Board and Farm Forum and Citizens Forum, which later became Cross-Country Check-up, all emerged from that web of relationships.
INTERVIEWER: Real grassroots radio, if you’ll pardon the pun!
ROGER: Well, that’s right –it’s part of the tradition in which Morningside is the current representative.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, you do us a great honour, sir. Thank you so much for joining us.
ROGER: Thank you. It’s been a great pleasure.
INTERVIEWER: Goodbye.
ROGER: Bye bye.
INTERVIEWER: Roger Schwass –he’s a professor of Environmental Studies at York University.
[--End of first segment of Morningside, June 18, 1993]
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