General Confederation of Agriculture

The General Confederation of Agriculture was founded in Bologna on August 17, 1920, as landowners joined together for the first time to form a national federation. It emerged amid a bitter contest with rural labor leagues whose control over hiring and agricultural work had made the countryside a central arena of postwar political conflict. The account records the federation’s creation but does not describe its internal structure or specify its subsequent institutional activities.

Formation Amid Rural Conflict

The federation’s founding came after months of league victories in the countryside. In Ferrara, seasonal farmhands and allied rural groups had secured changes to wages and recruitment, including a compulsory hiring quota requiring landowners to employ five workers for every thirty hectares during the winter months. By summer 1920, the leagues’ influence reached beyond hiring: they regulated work shifts, threshing, seed supplies, and planting. Their reach depended on enforcing common labor rules, while those who breached them could face fines, boycotts, or exclusion from local economic life.

The scale of that organization was substantial. Emilia had 223 Socialist-controlled municipalities out of 280, and Ferrara’s leagues reported 81,000 members at their first congress of proletarian unity in mid-May. Seasonal workers often found employment for only about 120 days a year, so disputes over wages and hiring were inseparable from the risk of hunger in the idle months. The federation thus appeared in a countryside where landowners faced not isolated workplace disputes but a coordinated system of labor organization that reached into production and community life.

The Landowners’ Counter-Organization

The founding scene is brief but significant: on August 17, while some people able to leave were at the seaside, Bologna’s landowners gathered and established a national body. The narrative presents this collective organization as a turning point in the accumulation of hostility. It also notes that agreements with prefects and police chiefs were being made behind the scenes, though it does not identify the parties to those agreements. The federation’s creation belongs to a widening struggle in which economic disputes increasingly intersected with public authority and political force.

The conflict had immediate material stakes. In August, harvested grain lay unthreshed and began to rot amid extreme heat, while the refusal to milk cattle formed part of the wider confrontation between peasant leagues and landowners. These disruptions show how control of agricultural labor could affect crops and livestock as well as the balance of power on estates. The account does not attribute particular acts of disruption to the federation or describe a specific program it adopted in response.

A Changing Balance of Power

The next phase of the rural conflict drew in organized Fascist forces. In May 1921, Italo Balbo proposed occupying Ferrara through a mass mobilization that would press the government to provide public works for unemployed farm laborers. Benito Mussolini authorized the plan, and thousands of impoverished workers marched into the city from the countryside. This later episode illustrates how political actors sought to mobilize rural distress, but the narrative does not identify the General Confederation of Agriculture as the organizer or sponsor of Balbo’s action.

Nor should the federation be confused with the Ferrara Agrarian Association. The latter is specifically identified as the provider of trucks for a Fascist punitive expedition in January 1921; that detail does not establish a role for the national federation. The evidence therefore places the General Confederation of Agriculture most firmly at its point of origin: a national association of landowners formed as rural leagues expanded their power, at a moment when disputes over labor, livelihoods, and authority were moving toward a broader political confrontation.