The PFRA, Dugouts and my Grandfather’s Caterpillars

The worldwide Great Depression that started in 1929 lasted for ten years with a devastating economic effect on those living on the Canadian Prairie Provinces, and especially on farmers in Saskatchewan. The economic depression years on the Canadian prairies were made worse by intermittent agricultural drought years and the collapse of agricultural product prices. The agricultural drought was most severe within the Palliser Triangle although areas north of the Palliser Triangle were also hit hard by drought [1].

The international world wheat trade had been in crisis since the end of the 1920s. Wheat production had been rigorously promoted in the wheat export countries of Canada, the USA, Argentina and Australia with self-sufficiency in wheat production equally promoted by previous wheat importing countries in Europe. Wheat prices plummeted because of a large oversupply of wheat stocks. There was no effective demand by other world wheat importing countries because they lacked the ability to pay [2].

Saskatchewan farm net income decreased substantially during the depression years and was negative during 1930 to 1934 and in 1937 [3].

The R. B. Bennett Federal Conservative Government came to power in 1930 and their policies did little to alleviate the plight of prairie farmers. However, they realized that policies and programs were needed similar to that of the USA “New Deal” of President Roosevelt. One of the initiatives the Conservatives proposed in their “New Deal” for Canada came under the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act that was passed in Parliament on 17 April 1935. The Act was to be administrated under the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA) and supported soil erosion, water and irrigation programs.

However, the Conservatives were swept out of office in October 1935 by W. L. Mackenzie King’s Liberals “King or Chaos” campaign before the PFRA program became effective. The liberals kept and adapted the PFRA program that (among other measures), supported new farming practices to stop soil, wind and water erosion. The program also initiated water holding practices (dugouts) to store and conserve water, irrigation projects and the development of community pastures.

Unfortunately, the PFRA program was “too little, too late” to help most prairie farmers as the damage from the drought had been done before the program became fully operational [4]. However, the PFRA, through its 22 District prairie offices, became a very effective government institution with major achievements that assisted many farmers for nearly eight decades. The Harper Conservative Government dissolved the PFRA in 2009.

Under one PFRA program, farmers could obtain a grant that paid for half the cost of digging a dugout on their farm as a reservoir to store water. The size of a dugout was normally 200 ft. x 100 ft., about 12 feet deep at the center, with sloped-in sides that held about a million gallons of water [5].

In 1939, my grandfather, Joseph S. Nagy (1899-1966), who farmed on his grandfather George’s homestead in the Yarbo district by Esterhazy, decided to take advantage of the PFRA program and go into the business of digging dugouts for farmers.

Money was scarce, but in 1938 he had a good 3,000-bushel oats crop. In the spring of 1939, my father Joseph A. Nagy and his elder brother Ernest, who were 14 and 15 years old respectively, hauled 1,800 bushels by horse and wagon to Yarbo and shovelled the oats by hand into a CNR railway boxcar. The rail car of oats was destined for New Brunswick and had been arranged by Pius “Dutch” Helmle, an uncle by marriage to my grandfather’s mother’s sister. Dutch, who emigrated from Germany in 1905 as a fourteen-year-old without his family, farmed, broke horses, traded cattle and horses along with everything else and was a character in his own right. It was never clear to the Nagy family how this New Brunswick transaction came about.

At $0.22 per bushel, my grandfather had sufficient funds for a down payment on a 35 HP Cletrac BD diesel caterpillar and tumblebug scraper. The equipment arrived by train at the Yarbo CNR siding on 10 September, 1939 - the day Canada declared war on Germany. My grandfather dug his first dugout on his farmstead and the dugout is still in use today. The 1939 fall freeze-up was late and they were able to dig several dugouts for farmers before the cold weather stopped them in mid - December.

Cletrac BD Diesel and Tumblebug Scraper. Photo courtesy of author.

They sold the tumble-bug scraper in 1941 and bought a BE-GE 340 hydraulic scraper that was more efficient and could haul three cubic yards at a time. A year or so later they sold the diesel Cletrac BD and bought a 35 HP Cletrac BGH caterpillar with a gasoline engine. The reason for the switch from a diesel to a gasoline engine was that diesel became difficult to obtain during the war years as the military had priority.

My grandfather and his four sons Ernest, Joe Jr., Gilbert and Louis worked digging dugouts with the help of one or two hired men. At times they would work the caterpillars 24 hours a day.

Accompanying the Cletrac outfit was a bunkhouse on wheels. The bunkhouse was equipped with a bed, a kitchen and a stove. Over the twenty-five year period from 1940 to 1965, they dug most of the farm dugouts within a twenty-mile radius of their Yarbo farm. Ernest Nagy dug the last dugout on SW 10-20-33-W1 in the mid-1960s.

Joseph S. Nagy and the Cletrac BGH and BE-GE Scraper. Photo courtesy of author.

Initially, the PFRA payments for digging dugouts went to the owner of the land where the dugout was being dug and then the owner paid my grandfather the PFRA portion plus the remaining half. However, times being what they were, on many occasions the farmers did not pay my grandfather or were very slow to pay. This necessitated my grandfather to take out a Power of Attorney and have the PFRA payment paid directly to him. In 1961, the PFRA paid $0.07/cubic yard for digging a dugout of between 3,100 and 3,650 cubic yards.

In addition to digging dugouts, they also dug basements for houses. They dug the basements at no charge for St. Anthony’s Hospital in 1940 and the Catholic Church in 1943 in Esterhazy.

The Nagys also did road construction and road gravelling with the Cletrac outfit throughout the district. Shortly after WWII, they build their own gravel conveyer system to load trucks that then spread the gravel on the road.

World War II brought about an opportunity for earth moving work for airport construction for the British Commonwealth Air Training Program. They did airport construction work and drainage ditch construction at Estevan, Weyburn, Moose Jaw, Dauphin and Neepawa. In 1943, they constructed a road to the Moose Jaw airport. As these locations were quite distant, the caterpillar was loaded on a truck and the BE-GE scraper and bunkhouse were pulled behind.

In 1947 they expanded their enterprise by purchasing a 1930 Caterpillar Sixty. The “Old Sixty” as it was called was used for bush cutting and to also pull a large single ploughshare breaker plough. The Nagys pushed bush and broke land both on their own farm and for many farmers within a twenty mile radius of their farmstead. In the late 1950s, they added a 1953 Oliver/Cletrac 60 HP caterpillar with a Slusser McLean 5 yard scraper.

The “Old Sixty” on NE 04 20 33 W1 west of Yarbo, SK. in 1952.  The caterpillar is driven by my father Joseph A. Nagy with his children Joanne, Joseph G. and Jerome; Brownie the dog looking on. Photo courtesy of author.

The Cletrac caterpillar was also used for other purposes. I found a curious 1947 newspaper article printed in the Esterhazy Observer and Pheasant Hills Advertiser entitled “The Trail of ’47, Langenburg Bonspiel or Bust”. Apparently, two curling rinks from Esterhazy were to play in the Langenburg curling bonspiel, a distance of just over 50 km from Esterhazy. However, the weather did not cooperate and dumped one of the largest snowfalls on record, creating “the greatest snowbanks in half a century”.

My grandfather lent the Cletrac caterpillar and bunkhouse on wheels to the curlers. The Cletrac was driven by George DeGryse who worked digging dugouts for my grandfather. The members on the trip included Lorance Larson, Herb Flook, Jerry Lobb, John Morrison, Sandy Lukiwiski, Don MacKenzie, Ronald Morrison, Bill Gonczy, Ray Kingdom and Ted Shimnoski along with eight pairs of curling rocks. “It looked like the real thing – a full-scale assault on the north pole, and the weather was for real at 30 below.” After about 20 hours, they reached Langenburg. The article does not say if they won any of their curling games.

My grandfather discontinued working with his caterpillars around 1965 just before his death. The Nagy family still owns the Cletrac BGH caterpillar and the BE-GE scraper.  The BE-GE scraper is still used today although refurbished and pulled by one of the farm tractors. The Cletrac BGH is in the process of being restored.

In retrospect, had there been a PFRA program in place sometime in the early 1920s, it may have lessened to a large degree the economic damage done to farmers and to the environment during the 1930s. Today, under the Federal-Provincial Canadian Agricultural Partnership program, Farm and Ranch Water Infrastructure Program (FRWIP), a Saskatchewan farmer can still get a rebate for dugouts, pipelines and wells.

 Joseph G. Nagy

JOSEPH G. NAGY grew up on a farm west of Yarbo near Esterhazy, SK. He worked at Agriculture Canada, Ottawa and at the U of S Agriculture Economics Department, Saskatoon. He also worked as an international agricultural and applied economics consultant and lived in Burkina Faso, Pakistan and in West Africa. Now retired, he was last employed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN and spent five years at FAO, Rome and three years at FAO Budapest travelling extensively in Eastern Europe and Asia. He and Margaret live in Saskatoon.

“people stories” shares articles from Folklore Magazine, a publication of the Saskatchewan History & Folklore Society. Four issues per year for only $25.00! Click below to learn more about the Magazine and to find out how to get your story into the blog!

 Endnotes

1. Captain John Palliser, of the Palliser Expedition, 1857-1860, delineated a large portion of what was then British North America (now the southern Canadian prairies), as arid, susceptible to drought and likely unfit for sustained commercial agriculture. Today, this area is called the Palliser Triangle and is defined roughly as an inverted V with the apex just under Saskatoon running south-east into the corner of neighboring Manitoba to the USA border and running south-west into western Alberta to the USA border. However, the actual area is not fixed and fluctuates with changing weather cycles and thus one can find various interpretations of the area and location of the Palliser Triangle. Most of the Palliser Triangle area is in agricultural production today based on advances in agricultural technology and farming system practices. See I. M. Spry, The Palliser Expedition: The Dramatic Story of Western Canadian Exploration 1857-1860, (Fifth House Publishers, Calgary, AB, 1963).

2. W. Way, A New Idea In the Morning: How Food and Agriculture Came Together in One International Organization, Chapter 5 The Wheat Crisis of the 1930s (ANU Press, Canberra 2013): 129-151.

3. Based on G. E. Britnell, Saskatchewan 1930 -1935. The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science / Revue Canadienne d'Economique et de Science politique (Vol. 2, No. 2 May 1936): 143-166., and, statistics from Saskatchewan Agriculture and Food, Agricultural Statistics, Statistics Branch (Regina, Saskatchewan 1975).

4. For an in-depth analysis of the origins of the PFRA, see G. P. Marchildon, G. P., The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration: Climate Crisis and Federal-Provincial Relations During the Great Depression (The Canadian Historical Review, 90, 2, University of Toronto Press. June 2009): 275-301.

5. Ibid.