Green’s Dictionary of Slang

(Can./US) a poor farmer, thus a fool; also attrib.

1921		Chillicothe Gaz. (OH) 5 July 5/6: Roth wouldn’t fight and Broussard knocked him ‘cuckoo’ [...] As a fighter Roth would make a good ‘stubble jumper’.
1929		Sheboygan Press (WI) 15 Apr. 9/4: The stubble jumpers, or more often called Sod-Busters [...] are the ones with big families.
1931		Star-Phoenix (Saskatoon) 11 Feb. 12/7: An amusing hoclkey match between the Harris girls dressed in pyjamas, and the Stubble Jumpers, men who are just learning to skate, dressed as clowns.
1939		Leader-Post (Regina, Saskatchewan) 4 Oct. 11/4: Term for the prairie migrants is ‘stubble-jumpers‘.
1944		Vancouver Sun (BC) 28 Nov. 11/1: Some of his stubble-jumper pals from the prairies.
1946		Calif. Folklore Quarterly Apr. 164: ‘Longhorns’ are greenhorns from Texas who came to the mines of Butte in great numbers, [...] ‘Top hands’, ‘sodbusters’, ‘hay stopers’, ‘stubble jumpers’, [...] denote farmers who have turned to mining, and these terms are always opprobrious .
1957		H.B. Allen ‘Pejorative Terms for Midwest Farmers’ in AS XXXIII:4 265: [...] stubble jumper.
1961		Sun (Vancouver) 4 July 1/1: The prairie farmer, to those of us who don’t know him well, is a stock comic character. Clod-hopper, we call him, and stubble-jumper .
1964		H. Gamer Author, Author! 60: Since the War, large numbers of them have been led astray by stubble-jumpers from Tignish or Musquodoboit, strumming mail order gee-tars and bewailing the loss of their boots and saddle.
1978		Maledicta II:1+2 (Summer/Winter) 171: Stubble-jumper The Canadian equivalent of Okies, the Stubble-jumpers fled poor dirt-farms during the Great Depression and migrated westward. Their descendents are still called Stubble-jumpers today, as are dirt-farmers in general.
1985		Leader-Post (Regina,Saskatchewan) 18 Mar. 27/2: ‘I don’t want Ottowa to tell us out here [...] that we’re navel-gazing stubble-jumpers out of tune with the great [...] cultural movements of the world’.
1991		(con. 1920s) O.D. Brooks Legs 100: I’m a stubble jumper from a small town outside Saskatoon.
2006		Calgary Herald (Alberta) 29 Jan. 4/1: Even the most gifted stubble-jumper may get his feet tangled.