Allan McLeod wasn't flashy. He was quiet and staid, especially in public. But a succession of Saskatchewan Wheat Pool presidents, industry committees and federal commissions relied on both his information and his perspective through the trying times of the 1970s and 80s, making him a key influencer both of public policy and of producer response.
"He batted above his weight," said former Wheat Pool president Garf Stevenson. "He played a very strong role."
McLeod died on June 23 at the age of 85. He was born on a farm at Dilke, Sask., on July 20, 1925, just a year after the Wheat Pool came into existence as a farmers' co-operative seeking fair prices for grain. Growing up in co-op country during the Dirty Thirties made him a firm believer in the distinctive Prairie notion that we are stronger together, and that we owe each other support and a fair chance.
Following service in the Second World War, McLeod attended the University of Saskatchewan, graduating in 1949 with a BSc in agriculture. In 1950 he hired on as a field agent with the Wheat Pool.
After several years in rural extension, in what became the member relations division, he moved into communication and advertising (later the publicity division) for nearly a decade, before transferring to the newly formed research division in 1962. When he became corporate secretary in 1986, he was the first to bring to the post hands-on experience in each of the three divisions he would be supervising. He was also the first to have a degree in agriculture.
Within five years he was research co-ordinator, and in 1973 became director of the research division, a position he held for 12 years; he was then corporate secretary until retiring in 1989.
He maintained broad associations in his field, serving as president of both the Saskatchewan Institute of Agrologists and the Agricultural Institute of Canada. He served three years on the National Council of the Canadian Transportation Research Forum, and was later made a life member. When the POS (protein, oilseed and starch) Pilot Plant Corp. was established in 1977, he was a founding board member and remained on the board for some years, where his understanding of both the science and the economy of canola made him valuable.
It was as an economic and policy researcher that he made his most important contributions. He rose to leadership in the research division just as the grain transportation system came to crisis. Ever since the Crow's Nest Pass Agreement of 1897, farmers had been shipping grain by rail at subsidized rates. By the late 1950s the railways were losing money on this. The inflationary seventies exacerbated the problem, so that by 1977 the railway companies were bearing 50 per cent of the variable costs of moving grain. This led to cutbacks in branch-line maintenance and replacement of rolling stock. Major delays and lost sales due to lack of capacity ensued, particularly when Russian and Chinese demand peaked in the late sixties. The whole system threatened to collapse.
A series of federal commissions through the seventies and eighties investigated the situation and made recommendations. The Prairie provincial governments and the producers, of course, also became involved; and in the middle of it all was Allan McLeod.
"You have to understand the context," explains Colin Churcher, who was Transport Canada's director of grain transportation from 1975 to 1986. "It was a very, very conservative approach. There were 180,000 grain producers in the Prairies, most of them allied to a pool. Saskatchewan was the least willing [of the three provinces] to make changes in rail network configuration, and they wanted control of any changes. They had wooden elevators, farmers were only going 10 miles to move grain – the idea of concentration hadn't gotten through."
E.K. (Ted) Turner, Wheat Pool president from 1969 to 1987, has an answer for that: "We resisted more than other provinces because most of the grain was here, and lots of farmers."
Saskatchewan was almost wholly dependent on wheat, making producers extremely vulnerable to fluctuations in global market price and to rising transportation costs. The Grains Group in Ottawa, which was pressing for rail line abandonment and fewer and larger plants, "never seemed to bring the individual farmer into the question," Turner said.
He said that the Wheat Pool could have led the way in streamlining, and benefited as a company from it, but that as a farmer-owned co-operative it also had to consider the individual producer.
McLeod knew the Crow rate would be lost. On committee after committee, and as industry liaison to federal commissions, he mediated between the irresistible force of the economy and the immovable object of the farm community.
"He was in a unique position," Churcher said. Because he was not one of the regionally elected representatives to the Wheat Pool Board, but reported to it as head of research, he could inform opinion.
"Our aim," said McLeod in a report, "is to encourage a greater understanding, among members, of the larger national and international issues which affect farm operations in Saskatchewan."
To his broad knowledge, McLeod added diplomacy, loyalty to his company and community, and empathy. "He was a friend," says Churcher, who credits him with being "of tremendous assistance" in bringing change.
And he could describe unpalatable realities "in a way that wouldn't get [people's] backs up."
He was also astute. "You ignored his advice at your own peril," recalled Turner – although it is debatable how often his advice was ignored. Once he had, in his quiet, methodical way, reached a conclusion, he would not back down. "I never saw him lose an argument," Stevenson said. "Nobody could argue with his rationale."
McLeod's commitment to intelligent development led him to several overseas consulting assignments through CIDA. In 1974 he and a Wheat Pool colleague went to Lesotho in Africa to assist with oilseed production and processing; 1987 saw him in St. Lucia; and after retiring he went as a consultant to Estonia in 1991. Wherever he went, he would learn a little of the language, try the different foods, discover other people's way of seeing the world.
Yet he remained true to his own principles. He made it his life's work to find the meeting place between the co-operative Prairie ethos and the competitive, global, free-market economy; and he kept his community abreast of the times through a period of massive transformation.
He leaves behind a changed agricultural economy.
He also leaves his wife of 60 years, Jeanne-Marie McLeod, children Keith, Li and Barbara, six grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
Special to The Globe and Mail