Editors and publishers have come and gone but throughout most of the 80-year history of the Western Producer there has been one constant fixture in the owner’s chair.
That changed Jan. 16, 2002, when Saskatchewan Wheat Pool divested itself of its long-standing interest in the newspaper business.
Serious financial woes that came to light in the late 1990s forced the grain company to unload numerous “non-core assets” including the Producer, a paper the pool had owned since 1931.
It was sold to GVIC Communications Inc., a company with other interests in the publishing business, for $12 million. The British Columbia firm owns the paper today.
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The deal came at a time when the newspaper had a healthy bottom line, generating sales of $16 million and earnings before income taxes, depreciation and amortization of nearly $4.1 million.
It was quite a different story in 1931 when Saskatchewan Wheat Pool began its relationship with the Producer.
The crash of stock and commodity prices on Oct. 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday, brought the fledgling paper to its knees.
Wheat prices fell below initial payments and never recovered. The Western Producer derived most of its $2 subscription fees from farmers’ final grain payments. Collapsing wheat prices meant no final payments that year and little revenue for the newspaper.
When the pool bailed the company out in 1931, the paper had assets of $128,000, liabilities of $119,000, and 27,000 unpaid subscriptions out of a total of 31,000.
The sale announcement was made by Harris Turner, a founder of The Progressive, the name of the paper during its first year of existence.
Turner launched The Progressive in 1923 with three other business partners, A. P. Waldron, Alexander McRobbie and William Hardy. The paper was formed to help support a Prairie-wide drive by farmers to begin pooling their wheat.
Saskatchewan Grain Growers Association provided a loan of more than $7,000 to launch the new printing and publishing firm called The Modern Press Limited.
By the end of 1923, The Progressive had amassed 6,000 subscribers. Today the Western Producer has a little more than 75,000 subscribers.
The Progressive was re-christened the Western Producer on Sept. 18, 1924 to avoid confusion with the Progressive political party.
In 1925, the paper expanded to 16 pages from eight and Violet McNaughton was added to the staff as the women’s editor. She wrote a column entitled Call to Women Readers.
The Open Forum letters section made its debut on June 18, 1925 and remains a popular feature today.
With the help of loans from Saskatchewan Wheat Pool and United Farmers of Canada, a new plant was built on Second Avenue in Saskatoon in 1927. It was equipped with a larger press that allowed the publishing company to print 24 pages at a time compared to the eight pages the old flatbed press could manage.
The paper lost one of its founders in 1931 when Harris Turner retired to Victoria. Waldron remained as publisher and editor after the company was bought by the pool. He was told to maintain the same editorial bent that had been expressed in the past.
Despite increasing its sub-scriber base to 48,000 readers from 31,000, the Producer lost $37,152 in its first year under new ownership. That was due in part to a decline in the annual subscription rate to 50 cents from $2, a reflection of Great Depression prices.
Circulation surpassed the 100,000 mark in 1936, although some farmers who were short on cash paid for their subscription in chickens rather than dollars.
In 1948 the Producer launched a colour magazine section with features about western people. Circulation of the newspaper had climbed past 160,000 readers, but it was still only the fourth largest agricultural paper, ranking behind The Family Herald, Country Guide and Free Press Weekly Prairie Farmer.
Emmie Oddie began her home economics column I’d Like to Know in 1949. It became one of the longest-running columns in the newspaper.
The first Prairie Wild Life column by Doug Gilroy appeared on Jan. 7, 1954. Forty-six years and 1,594 columns later, he wrote his last one in the Dec. 14, 2000 issue of Western People magazine.
Fifty Mighty Men, a serial by Grant McEwan, became a best-seller for Prairie Books in 1957, the first year the Western Producer launched its book-publishing department. It’s also the year the first farm account book was given away as a subscription premium.
Waldron retired as Western Producer publisher and editor in 1958 and was replaced by Tom Melville-Ness, who switched emphasis from international news to coverage of farm policy and farm production.
With the installation of a new colour web press in 1965, the paper published its first colour supplement, including full-page, four-colour pictures of Western Canada.
In 1967, several staff members were sent to Expo 67 in Montreal to cover the event. Alberta Producer, a free supplement that was sent to all Alberta farmers, was launched on Canada’s centennial.
A postal strike disrupted delivery of the paper in 1968, the year Waldron wrote his last Notes and Comments column.
The paper established an advertising sales office in Toronto in 1970. Others opened during the next two years in Regina, Edmonton, Calgary and Winnipeg.
Melville-Ness retired and was succeeded by the new editor and publisher Robert H. D. Phillips, in 1973, the 50th anniversary of the newspaper. He ended the practice of publishing pieces of news stories from other publications. And he bought the rights to use Reuters News Agency and Christian Science Monitor articles.
Another postal strike in 1975 resulted in the paper being delivered to subscribers through Saskatchewan Wheat Pool country elevators and farm service centres.
In 1976, Ellen Nygaard became the first female agricultural editor at the paper.
The Producer moved to a former Massey-Ferguson depot in Saskatoon’s north industrial area in 1977, where it is still head-quartered today. The company changed its name from The Modern Press Ltd. to Western Producer Publications.
Staff reporter Adrian Ewins opened the first bureau outside Saskatoon in 1978 in Edmonton. That office has since closed but the paper still has reporting bureaus in Calgary, Camrose, Regina, Brandon, Winnipeg and Ottawa. The newspaper also introduced a 16-page magazine supplement called Western People in 1978, with pages half the size of a tabloid.
June 24, 1983, is still known by those that work in the Western Producer office as “the day the roof fell in.” A violent hail and rainstorm caused the collapse of part of the roof at the Western Producer building. No one was hurt, but it took a seven-year lawsuit to establish that the insurance policy covered the cost of fixing the structure.
The roles of publisher and editor were divided in 1987 when Phillips retired. Allan Laughland became publisher and Keith Dryden was appointed editor of the paper.
In 1988, the printing arm of the company became part of a new Regina firm called M.C. Graphics. Saskatchewan Wheat Pool retained a major ownership in the new firm, but for the first time since its inception, the Western Producer was no longer part of the same company as the printing operation.
The newspaper installed a desktop computer system in 1989, which allowed editors to design pages onscreen for the first time.
Canada Post announced plans to slash newspaper postal subsidies in 1990, which would have meant a sudden 700 percent increase in postal costs for the paper. Protests by Producer readers convinced the federal agency to phase in the reduction. Later that year a strike at M.C. Graphics prevented publication of a scheduled issue of the Producer for the first time in the paper’s history.
Keith Dryden retired as editor in 1991 and was succeeded by Garry Fairbairn, who modernized the newsroom with tools like desktop computers and digital cameras long before they were in vogue. He also established a web presence for the paper.
Western Producer Prairie Books was shut down in 1991 and the beloved Western People magazine lost its distinctive “little magazine” format and was incorporated into the regular newspaper.
Circulation slipped to less than 100,000 readers in 1993 as the prairie farm population continued its downward slide, but the paper was still being read by more Western Canadian farmers than any other farm publication.
The Western Livestock Producer supplement was born in 1989 and became its own section of the paper in 2000.
Many other supplements have come and gone. The paper now publishes the Saskatchewan Seed Guide, the Western Canola and Pulse Crops Producer and the Diversified Livestock Producer.
Western People was restored to its magazine format in 1995 but declining membership brought an end to the venerable Young Co-operators club. Later that year the Producer launched its site on the worldwide web (www.producer.com).
For only the second time in its history, the Producer missed a scheduled issue due to a national postal strike in 1997.
That same year, separate Alberta-B.C. and Saskatchewan-Manitoba editions were unveiled. The same stories and photos received different play in each edition to appeal to those in a specific geographical area. But in 1999, the Producer reverted to a one edition paper.
Farming, a glossy full colour magazine that provides “practical production information for profitable farming,” made its debut in 1998. It provided readers with technical features and photos that offered more depth and detail than typical newspaper articles.
In 1999, Elaine Shein replaced Fairbairn as editor of the newspaper. She was a strong proponent of journalism ethics and encouraged the reporting staff to spend more time on longer pieces such as special reports and investigative stories.
With the end of 2000, came the demise of Western People. Editor Michael Gillgannon surmised in his quirky Dear Reader column that the magazine was a victim of high printing costs and little advertising.
The company’s insurance department, which began in the late 1950s was also closed that year.
Laughland retired as publisher in 2001 and Ken Zacharias was named interim publisher. The interim part of that title was dropped a year later when GVIC bought the company.
Farming magazine was incorporated into the regular newspaper in 2002. But the big news that year came on Jan. 16 when Saskatchewan Wheat Pool ended its 71-year relationship with the paper by selling the Producer to GVIC.
In a Jan. 17, 2002 editorial, Shein pointed out to readers that when the paper was bought by the pool in 1931, editor Harris Turner said, “…may it flourish as the mouthpiece of the indomitable spirit of the Canadian farmer.” She added, “in this new era for the Producer, we repeat that wish.”
Shein left the newspaper in 2003.
Now in its 80th year of existence, the paper continues to carve out a place in prairie agricultural history. It no longer has the direct financial support of one of the largest grain companies in Canada, but with eight decades of service to western Canadian farmers the paper has clout of its own.
Earlier this year, the Producer led the charge in convincing the Department of Canadian Heritage to back away from its plans to eliminate a crucial postal subsidy heavily relied upon by the Canadian farm press.
Just another bump on the long and winding grid road to the rural mailboxes of the West.
