PUBLISHED JUNE 1955 | BETTER FARMING
This cartoon, appearing in the June 1955 issue of Better Farming, demonstrates one of the most pressing challenges facing family farms following the Second World War. The war resulted in rapid and critical technological innovations that were readily applicable to agriculture, the most important of these being: gas and electric-powered machinery, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers. While these innovations greatly improved productivity, they introduced the combined pressures of overproduction with increased input costs that made it very difficult to sustain traditional family farms. This resulted in a consolidation of farmland, as many smaller farms could not keep up with increasing costs.
The resulting mass exodus from rural communities to cities was a great concern to governments, which employed a number of strategies to deal with the “real tough guy” identified in this cartoon. The United States introduced a system of agricultural subsidies through the Farm Bill; in Canada the government became heavily involved in the purchasing, selling, and marketing of agricultural products and developed quota systems.