NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

August 12, 1999

Plains Folk: A Place Where Co-operation Works

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

©1999 Plains Folk

Although we tend to think of the Great Plains as Bob Dole country, most of North America's successful experiments with socialism lie in the region. Public power in Nebraska, the state-owned mill and elevator and bank in North Dakota, and a whole range of public enterprises in Saskatchewan are examples.

There have been many more socialistic laboratories on the plains that have imploded. In the 19th century, a lot of what historians like to call utopian communities staked their claims on the Great Plains frontier; there was a regular reef of them in Kansas, for instance. They all fell apart within a generation.

So is this a socialist country or not? The answer seems to be that we on the plains are willing to turn to socialism for certain key public services--everything from state- or province-wide public power to a local co-operative grocery store. But we get touchy about what socialists call the means of production. Family farms, I mean. We want to keep the land in individual hands.

Except for the Hutterites, of course, who are spectacularly successful as religious socialists. I've never been sure, though, whether it is socialism or the old-fashioned values of hard work and commodity diversification that have made the Hutterites successful.

I was surprised, then, when a few weeks ago I drove right into an island of successful and secular socialist enterprise on the land. This was while I was exploring the Matador Community Pasture, between Kyle and Beechy, Saskatchewan. The island I'm talking about is the Matador Farming Pool, which used to be the Matador Co-operative Farm.

The story is that at the close of World War II Saskatchewan had a CCF government, meaning that the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation was in power. The CCF contained some strongly idealistic socialists who wanted to set up cooperative farms across the province--farms where the land would be held and worked in common by groups of farmers. These were intended mainly to give returning veterans a start in farming. Thirty-two such socialist islands were set afloat on the prairie. Two of them--the Matador Co-operative Farm and the Beechy Co-operative Farm--were created on lands broken out of the old Matador Community Pasture.

Only one, the Matador, has persisted to the present. Most of the others went under when they faced the crisis of transition from one generation to another. The Matador solved this problem by cutting a deal with the provincial land bank whereby the original co-op farmers turned over the land to the land bank, which let the next generation into the operation on good terms.

The other thing that kept the Matador operation going was a powerful belief that democratic socialism was a good way of life. At the Matador pool, a leafy enclave of residences and shops arranged on a circle drive in the middle of a vast open spaces, I was lucky enough to wander into the kitchen of Kay and Lorne Dietrick. Looking for directions, I also got a cup of coffee as well as the story of the Matador pool.

Lorne Dietrick was one of the original 17 veterans who broke land for the co-op in 1946. Kay was the first schoolteacher in the co-op. While we talked, in walked their son Brent and co-farmer Danny Zazelenchuk, representatives of the next generation.

They said, "If there's a job to do, and no one wants to do it, we just sit until someone does." Hours of work are "self-regulated" and governed by "peer pressure." The earlier generation, Lorne Dietrick says, "learned the value of common property." And it's still working in this prairie place of Saskatchewan.

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NDSU Agriculture Communication
Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136

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