In a province where family farms once outnumbered city households, agricultural policy was never merely an economic matter — it was the lens through which Saskatchewan people understood their relationship to government, to markets, and to each other. Even as the province has urbanised and diversified, the political instincts shaped by generations of farming life continue to define who wins and who loses in Saskatchewan.
The Co-operative Movement and Collective Power
The early history of Saskatchewan agriculture is a history of collective organisation against market power. Wheat farmers in the first decades of the twentieth century faced grain elevator companies that set prices, railways that charged discriminatory freight rates, and financial institutions that were far more interested in eastern Canadian investors than in the fate of western homesteaders. The response was the co-operative movement — a network of farmer-controlled organisations that pooled purchasing, provided marketing services, and eventually entered the financial sector through credit unions.
The Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, established in 1924, was the province’s most significant co-operative enterprise. At its peak it was one of the largest grain-handling companies in the world, owned by its farmer-members and committed to maximising returns to producers rather than to shareholders. The Pool’s existence shaped Saskatchewan’s political culture in ways that outlasted the organisation itself — instilling a scepticism of private corporate power and a belief in collective economic action that runs through the province’s political identity to the present day.
The Crow Rate and the Freight Fight
Few policies generated more sustained political passion in Saskatchewan than the Crow’s Nest Pass Agreement of 1897, which established below-market freight rates for prairie grain shipped by rail to export positions. The “Crow Rate” became a cornerstone of the prairie agricultural economy, enabling farmers to access export markets by offsetting the enormous transport disadvantage of producing grain a thousand kilometres from the nearest port. When the federal government began to modify and ultimately eliminate the Crow benefit in the 1980s and 1990s, the response in Saskatchewan was visceral. The freight rate fight engaged farm organisations, the NDP, rural municipalities, and a significant portion of the province’s identity politics in a struggle that illustrated how deeply agricultural policy was woven into Saskatchewan’s sense of itself.
The Canadian Wheat Board
The Canadian Wheat Board, which held a statutory monopoly on the export marketing of western wheat and barley, was perhaps the most contested agricultural institution in Canadian history. Supporters argued that the Board’s single-desk selling power gave prairie farmers bargaining leverage against large grain traders and international buyers that individual producers could never achieve on their own. Critics, including many Saskatchewan Party supporters and western conservative voices generally, argued that the monopoly restricted farmer freedom and that open markets would produce better outcomes.
The Harper government abolished the Canadian Wheat Board’s single-desk mandate in 2012, ending more than seven decades of mandatory pooling. The political impact in Saskatchewan was mixed: the province had voted for the Harper government in large numbers and many farmers genuinely welcomed the change, while others mourned the loss of collective bargaining power. The subsequent years produced varied results, with some farmers prospering under open marketing arrangements and others facing the volatility that the Board’s pooling had historically smoothed.
Canola, Diversification, and Rural Depopulation
The agricultural economy that Saskatchewan politicians must now address has changed dramatically from the wheat monoculture of the early twentieth century. Canola — developed through plant breeding research at Canadian universities in the 1970s — has become one of the province’s most valuable crops, offering farmers diversification that reduces dependence on wheat price cycles. Pulse crops, lentils in particular, have made Saskatchewan one of the world’s largest exporters. The agricultural sector generates substantially more revenue per farm than it did a generation ago, but it does so with far fewer farms and far fewer farm families.
Rural depopulation has reshaped the political geography of the province. Communities that supported churches, schools, hockey rinks, and weekly newspapers a generation ago have contracted or disappeared. The political question of how to sustain rural services — healthcare, education, infrastructure — in a landscape of dispersed, capital-intensive agriculture with a declining resident population is one that no government has fully answered. The Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture continues to develop programmes addressing the structural challenges facing rural communities.
The farm vote, once synonymous with the rural heartland’s dominant influence on provincial outcomes, has been diluted by urbanisation — Regina and Saskatoon now hold a majority of the province’s population and votes. But the values and memories associated with farming life continue to shape how Saskatchewan voters think about government, markets, and collective responsibility. Understanding the farm vote is still essential to understanding politics in Saskatchewan.