The Rise and Fall of United Grain Growers: Cooperatives, Market Regulation, and Free Enterprise by Paul D. Earl

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of United Grain Growers: Cooperatives, Market Regulation, and Free Enterprise by Paul D. Earl Joseph M. Santos The Rise and Fall of United Grain Growers: Cooperatives, Market Regulation, and Free Enterprise. By Paul D. Earl. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2019. vii + 337 pp. Illustrations, statistical appendix, notes, bibliography, index. C$27.95, US$31.95 paper. In The Rise and Fall of United Grain Growers, Paul D. Earl, a faculty member in the Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba, chronicles the history of a cooperative that began as the Grain Growers’ [End Page 179] Grain Company in 1906 and ended as Agricore United in 2007, when the company was acquired by the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. The author organizes the book chronologically, according to the tenures of the company’s leaders; chapter titles include “The Law Years, 1930–47” and “The Runciman Years, 1961– 81,” for example. The author’s overall objective is to investigate the circumstances surrounding the Pool’s takeover of Agricore United. To be sure, the outcome was counterintuitive: the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, the only surviving vestige of the famed Canadian provincial pool movement, absorbed its seemingly stronger, better-positioned, and, by that time, uniquely farmer-controlled, shareholder-owned rival. The acquisition, which the author describes as regrettable, marked the end of a rich century-long history of farmer control of the Canadian grain trade. The author investigates the acquisition from four perspectives: namely, commercial, traditional, legal, and that of business historian. Most readers will recognize the commercial perspective, according to which a board’s primary fiduciary duty is to maximize shareholder value; the takeover of Agricore United ostensibly met this criterion absent counterfactual evidence to the contrary, of course. If we narrowly apply the commercial perspective to Agricore United, we judge its take-over as entirely appropriate. Had the board declined the Pool’s overture, the board’s actions would have been tantamount to dereliction of (fiduciary) duty. Or maybe not. After all, like its earlier incarnations dating back to the Grain Growers’ Grain Company (1906), Agri-core United was a member-controlled going concern, which ultimately issued publicly traded shares thanks to the eponymous United Grain Growers Act (1992). The company was not historically, legislatively, or culturally typical, so why should the standard rules apply? They should not, according to the author, who strongly and provocatively argues his case from the other three perspectives. The result is a terrifically organized interrogation of the shareholder-value criterion in the case of the Agricore United takeover specifically and corporate governance generally. As such, the book—particularly its final chapters—would appeal to audiences of and outside grain-trade historians. Along the way, the author also chronicles the broader history of the Canadian grain trade, an early 20th-century private enterprise that transitioned, decades later, into a comprehensively regulated, federally managed and marketed operation. The sources of the transition, including the eventual establishment of a mandatory single-selling desk in the form of the Canadian Wheat Board, remain a subject of some debate among business historians. At one level, the transition embodied pragmatic governmental responses—income policies, essentially—in Canada and the United States to exigent wartime circumstances and severe business cyclicality, most notably during the Great Depression. For example, see Santos’s 2010 American Review of Canadian Studies article “Going against the Grain: Why Do Canada and the United States Market Wheat So Differently?” At another more-profound level, the transition embodied a Canadian cultural norm inclined toward cooperation—of the government-sanctioned sort and otherwise—and often in lieu of market forces; here the author invites readers to analogize the respective national cultural allures of the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police and the American cowboy, for example. The author seamlessly weaves and persuasively draws on this broader history to substantiate and enrich his investigation of and conclusions surrounding the Pool’s takeover of Agricore United. Joseph M. Santos Ness School of Management and Economics South Dakota State University Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies

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