Cooperative Harvests: Transnational Farmers’ Movements in the US and Canadian Northern Grasslands, 1905–50

“We are tied together with invisible bonds in a hundred different ways.” So wrote a Canadian observer after World War I about his country’s relationship with its southern neighbor. Among grain growers of the northern grasslands, transnational farmers’ organizations provided one of these unbreakable bonds.

In the first half of the twentieth century, organized wheat farmers in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, and the Prairie Provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, formed cross-border connections based on a common ideology of agrarian cooperation. Large-scale marketing organizations, co-ops of all stripes, and even radical agrarian political parties brought together farmers and rural people across the forty-ninth parallel.

The strongest transnational cooperative and political linkages took root between 1910 and 1930. The Great Depression and early cold war disrupted the forms and vibrancy of agrarian binational cooperation, as the United States and Canada pursued diverging political solutions to the farmers’ plight. Despite these challenges, the hope of a transnational cooperative commonwealth contributed to the maintenance of strong agrarian connections across the North American the northern grasslands in the 1930s and 1940s.

This is the story of a region of geographic, demographic, and agricultural integrity bisected by a political boundary. In the first half of the twentieth century, wheat growers built and based their transnational organizations on the idea of agrarian cooperation, struggling for their cooperative harvests.