Tool production would move increasingly farther from villages, with most factories being built outside Quebec. Modernization would mean ever-increasing reliance on upstream industries for farm inputs, as well as the abandonment of animal traction and less need for family labour.
The acquisition of the tractor is the most evocative symbol of this transformation. At the beginning of World War II, one in twenty farms had one. Thirty years later (in 1971), nine out of ten farms had one. These changes would force supply chains to reorganize. Very early on, the cooperative movement introduced initiatives to ensure that farmers had a place and a role in the reconfiguration of input supply channels. In 1913, the Comptoir coopératif de Montréal opened this door, a few years before it merged with two other cooperatives to form the Coopérative fédérée. Cooperative members were offered fertilizers, seeds, tools and equipment. This segment, upstream of farms, would remain a key activity for Fédérée in the decades to come.
Modernization would not be without consequences for social inequalities in agriculture. The poorest farmers, often in settlements and concessions, were unable to afford the tools that had become indispensable. In the 1940s, in Lac-Saint-Jean, a handful of farms were still thrashing cereals manually, working the soil with a plow and a wood axe, and sowing by hand. They would have no choice but to quit farming, often after attempting or refusing to go into debt to take the “technological shift.”
Nowadays, farmers are called upon to combine the reality of contending with heavy capitalization or using mechanical means to manage soil chemistry. This means running a business of unusual complexity in a context of fierce international competition for market access.