My friend Leah Rogne remembers setting up a cooperative candy store at the North Dakota Farmers’ Union summer camp in the 50’s. The children elected officers, organized, and operated the store as a coop, and distributed the dividends at the end of a week at camp. Leah can even sing some of the songs she learned at Farmers’ Union camp. She recalls attending regular union meetings with her parents and gathering with the other children present for civic education, then reporting back to the adults. This was typical of National Farmers’ Union affiliates across the country. Founded in 1902 by ten family farmers in Texas, the Farmers Educational Cooperative Union was organized to address fair market access for farmers. It spread across the country and the Minnesota Farmers Union was formed as an affiliate in Jackson County in 1918.
Farmers there were frustrated with being at the mercy of the railroads, company stores and milling companies who told them when to deliver, how much they would pay for product and how much they would charge the farmers to transport the product. They banded together for better pay through collective effort. The Farmers Union movement was based in the cooperative movement which was particularly strong among the Finnish American immigrants in northern Minnesota. And it fulfilled a function similar to the labor unions that had gotten their start several decades earlier.
From the beginning, the Farmers Union has represented itself with a triangle highlighting the core principles of cooperation, education, and legislation. Saint Louis County, Minnesota formed a Farmers Union chapter in 2020 and elected my friend Missy Roach as president. Missy was recently elected secretary of the state organization. She grew up in south Minneapolis far from farming, but eventually worked on a CSA farm in Fairbanks, Alaska. That was her first exposure to a “different kind of farm,” what we now call a specialty crop farm. When she moved here in 2003 and started farming in Bear River, she established the Cook Area Farmers Market to help get a local food infrastructure going.
Missy Roach at the Virginia Market Square Farmers Market
Missy joined the Minnesota Farmers Union because she saw that they were addressing issues that she cared about through policy and legislation. It’s a very grass-roots organization, with local resolutions going to a policy committee, then on to the state convention through delegates elected at the county level, and ultimately to the national convention. Issues like farm/food security, meat and poultry processing, generational farm transition, and building a resilient food system rise to the top. The Minnesota Farmers Union publishes a monthly journal, “Minnesota Agriculture,” which is available on their website www.mfu.org And they offer a youth leadership camp open to all children, farmers or not, in two locations: Erskine and New London.
Early in its history, the National Farmers Union had a hand in establishing the Federal Land Banks and, in 1931, established the Farmers Union Central Exchange which became Cenex Harvest States. In 1932, during the depths of the Depression, they lobbied hard for aid and tariff reform as farmers struggled, but to no avail. Enter Miles Reno, former president of the Iowa Farmers Union. He encouraged farmers to “take a holiday” and stop selling and buying. The National Farmers’ Holiday Association was born with the Farmers’ Strike of 1932-33. My friend Marlyn Swanson’s former husband Everett Luoma just happened to author a book about it. With her help, I got a copy.
The strike began in Sioux City, Iowa on August 8, 1932. Farmers blocked roads leading into the city and turned back trucks. The movement soon went nationwide. Between 1920 and 1930, 450,000 farm owners had lost their farms and gross annual farm income plummeted. To put this in perspective, “in 1919, the farmers supplied one-tenth of the manufactured products of the nation, valued at $6 billion. They supplied one-eighth of freight tonnage of the railroad systems, one-half of the exports and one-fifth of the cost of government.” They wielded a purchasing power of $16 billion. And in 1920 it all started collapsing so that by 1932, it was less than $5 billion. The strike blocked trucks from entering Sioux City for nine days until the Sheriff and his deputies accompanied truckers through the strike lines.
The strikers were angry, and 450 farmer-strikers armed themselves with clubs and bricks and stormed the Sioux City stockyards. Deputies stopped them. Deputies later tried to escort cattle trucks through the picket lines but were overcome by picketers. Truckers then stopped trying to cross the lines of farmers. The milk strike ended a few days later with dairy farmers gaining an increase in price. All other foods were blocked except those that got through by rail. So, the farmers used torpedoes and danger signals to halt trains. And the strike spread.
Eleven more states formed Farmer’s Holiday Associations and struck. Small-town newspapers were very supportive. And members of the general public, suffering in the Depression, were sympathetic. The sheriffs were holding the line against the strikers, not always successfully. Striking farmers numbered over a thousand at some locations. Nine months after the strike began, Congress passed the first farm bill. Founders of the Farmers’ Holiday Association believed that it didn’t go nearly far enough to solve their problems. But it was the start of the Farm Bill we know today. Eventually the strike waned, but the Minnesota Farmers Union is still strong.
Missy was recently elected secretary of the Minnesota Farmers Union
John Bosch, son of a Populist in Kandiyohi County, Minnesota, was a part of the Minnesota Farmers Union and an officer of the Farmers’ Holiday Association.He was interviewed in 1972 as part of a Minnesota Historical Society Oral History project.In 1930 as part of the Minnesota Farmers Union he proposed a similar strike with four goals: an immediate stop to farm foreclosures, obtaining the cost of production for farm products, abolishing the Federal Reserve and, in the event of another war, taxing all war production at 100 percent.His county organization voted to send him with his proposal to the state convention.The Minnesota Farmers Union “voted 100 per cent that I present this same program to the national convention.”He did, but the national union, which was heavily involved in co-operatives, was afraid that it might hurt the coops.So, they passed a resolution to support building another organization—and Mr. Bosch was there in Iowa when Milo Reno was elected president of that organization: the Farmers’ Holiday Association.And you know the rest of the story.