BROOKINGS For Gwen McCausland, director of the South Dakota Agricultural Heritage Museum, and her staff there was a wartime story, pretty much overlooked in the thousands of views of the war, that needed to be told. Now theyre telling it in the museums most recent exhibit: On the Farm Front: Agriculture during World War II in this upper region. We mainly focused on South Dakota, the director noted, but we also included North Dakota, Minnesota and a little bit of Nebraska.
McCausland noted that she has worked on World War II exhibits at other museums. But for this exhibit she and her staff really wanted to focus on farming and what was happening in rural life and really focus on the region and not go beyond that.
We have a very limited space. We designed it to be a traveling exhibit and we were very specific not to get too deep into various programs or too deep into political movements or economics or anything like that. We designed it as a traveling exhibit because if the people cant come to the museum, well take the museum to them.
She added that the scope of the exhibit was very broad, so people can add their own local stories.
Listed below is a sampling of the exhibit telling visitors of what World War II brought to South Dakota and its neighboring states and what they brought to the war effort.
Change, shortages, braceros
Most people talk about Rosie the Riveter, scrap drives, victory gardens, and rationing, McCausland said. They had the same thing here in rural communities but it was just slightly different.
Victory gardens. People have been gardening around this region for decades, generations. So they did that, but they also expanded their gardens. They gardened but then they added more; that was to help support the community and, of course, their own supply.
The war brought a re-introduction of growing hemp, which had been outlawed since 1937. There was Increased production of eggs and poultry, since poultry was not a rationed meat and eggs were turned into powder and sent overseas. Some creameries added on an egg-drying facility.
Farm equipment manufacturers, such as John Deere and Allis Chalmers, changed their production for the military, which then also affected getting parts and equipment available.
There were shortages of equipment, supplies and labor in South Dakota, as 40 percent of men shifted off the farm to military service overseas and to the military industry. The director explained that the need to backfill the labor force needed for harvest led to such agreements as the bracero program with the Mexican government to bring Mexican migrant workers into the United States to help with the harvest. The program lasted until the 1960s. They came up and, specifically in South Dakota, they followed the season.
The Womens Land Army looks at the role women played on the farm and as volunteers for the Food Corps. It was a program in which urban dwellers could be matched, via the Extension service, with farmers who needed laborers. Sometimes it was seasonal work; sometimes it was all year, McCausland said.
She also explained how some universities had harvest holidays, where they would go out in the fields and help with harvesting. A lot of it was potatoes, onions, strawberries, fruit.
POWs, Harvest Brigade, Extension
In a touch of irony, the nations enemies helped bring about, at least in some small and symbolic way, their own defeat: German prisoners-of-war did farm labor in South Dakota. There was a camp out near Bell Fourche, McCausland explained. A lot of those prisoners worked in the sugar beet fields. The Utah and Idaho Sugar Company plant was in Belle Fourche. There was another German POW camp in Clay County, Minnesota, and its occupants worked sugar beet fields near the Crystal Sugar plant. And in the New Ulm area, there were POWs doing more traditional farm work.
They worked at not just hoeing and harvesting of sugar beets; they worked in area farms shocking wheat.
Another aspect of the impact of war examined how agricultural industry addressed labor. Massey Harris was one of the first to develop a combine-harvester. The idea was that you didnt need to thresh; you could cut and thresh at the same time, McCausland explained.
A combined effort with the American and Canadian governments led to an agreement for the building of 500 combine-harvester machines and the development the Harvest Brigade, which set some records for harvesting wheat.
Meanwhile, with the entry of the United States into World War II, came an alpha roster of boards and agencies tied to the multiple roles of the urban and rural communities and of their agricultural and labor-driven businesses.
In the case of agricultural oversight, the federal government did not reinvent the wheel but relied on a network of up-and-running, already proven agencies: They (the federal government) saw the network of the Extension agencies, the Extension service, as already set-in-place; so they implemented Extension agents as the labor office, the director explained.
If you were a farmer, youd go to your local Extension agent, and say, I need so many workers for these amount of days and they would see their roster and they would connect you. The state Extension offices, they were sort of like the government of the state, and the state oversaw and it went down to the county level. She cited the bracero program and the Womens Land Army as two examples of how programs worked in South Dakota. The WLA was a program that found women to be placed in agricultural work by replacing men who had been called up to military service.
A time of prosperity
Overall, Americas World War years, from December 1941 to September 1945, were demanding of sacrifice for both urban and rural populations. But in the end our Greatest Generation saw us through.
But for farmers, McCausland acknowledged, there was an upside to World War II: We talk about a lot of sacrifice during the war; what is not often talked about is that it is a time of prosperity for farmers. They were coming out of the Depression and they were coming out of a 20-year drought, because the drought started in South Dakota in the 1920s. The rains started coming back in the early 40s.
It was almost like a perfect storm, where you had excellent weather, better equipment and you had more programs that, even though there were price limits, there were still very good prices.
Even though there was a labor shortage and a supply shortage, there was the largest on-record harvesting of wheat.
It was a time of rebound from the Depression, during the war. When it comes to World War II, there has not been much of a look at it from a rural point of view.
The exhibit will remain on display until spring 2025 and be available to rent the following summer.
For now, the museum is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. For more information , call 605-688-6226 or visit www.agmuseum.com.
Contact John Kubal at [email protected].
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