Who Pays for the Cold? French Farmers, Mayors, and State Bureaucrats Squabble over Winter’s Bills, 1929

As part of a 250-year-long study of one family olive farm in Nyons, France, this paper examines the coordinated and contentious efforts of farmers, the mayor’s office, and national officials to cover the bills left by the devastating winter of 1929. The late twenties and early thirties witnessed dramatic improvements in state subsidies supporting agricultural modernization for French farmers. Farmers received loans and payments to purchase mechanical tractors and chemically-engineered fertilizers. But the late winter freeze of 1929 presented particularly difficult challenges to fruit growers in the northern regions of the Ardeche and the Drome. After the freeze, ½ of all French olive farmers left production and those who continued growing in northern Provence faced huge losses of their heavily damaged orchards. The price of olives per 100 kg sky-rocketed from 250 francs in mid-January to 500 francs in mid-March and then disappeared from the market altogether.

Infrastructure damage added to the crisis. Because economically-conscientious farmers had turned off exterior water spigots, stationary water burst pipes and water meters across rural areas. Who should pay for their replacement - water providers or water consumers - created vigorous debate.

This paper will use newspaper articles, farm archives, and municipal documents to analyze the negotiations that followed the 1929 freeze to identify concepts of public and private economic loss-sharing, state obligation to mitigate farmers’ losses, and municipal government’s efforts to spread local costs to the national government. In the short-term, those farmers who managed to salvage some of their orchards won state restitution. But even government subsidies could not compensate for the destruction of ½ of France’s olive orchards. The story of 1929 reveals the possibilities and limitations of state subsidies for agricultural loss and reveals that farmers supported by generous and powerful government advocates proved a weak bulwark against weather crises.