I’m going to put this right out there: I have absolutely no farm experience.
I grew up in the city and I never worked on a family farm during the summer. If anything, I’m a lake kid, and my summer memories are filled with still shots of wide-eyed kids wiping out on water skis and bonfires down on the beach at Buffalo Pound Lake.
These aren’t my only childhood memories, though. It’s hard to miss the farms and the work going on in fields at harvest time when you’re driving to and from the lake.
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I often stared at those farms from the back seat of the family car and wondered, “who lives there?” and “what are they doing?”
I liked to explore as a kid, and the day trips my family took to my cousins’ farm made me green with envy. My backyard seemed small and boring compared to the seemingly vast stretch of land my cousins knew.
During these trips, the country cemented its hold on me. The farm was an outpost in the wilderness, a place to come home to after a day spent exploring the land.
I’m Noel Busse, and I’ve come to The Western Producer from the University of Regina’s journalism program.
Three months ago, if you had asked me where I saw myself at the beginning of 2008, I would never have said The Western Producer. Other than a few old stacks in my grandparents’ attic, my experience with this paper was minimal.
Something strange happened while I was at university, though. As the semester progressed I found, much to my surprise, that I was orbiting around agricultural news. Let’s just say the avian flu outbreak provided me with more stories than I like to admit.
So it seemed almost too good to be true that as I was gaining an interest in agriculture, the Producer just happened to be an option on the internship sign-up sheet.
This may reek of sentimentality to those who own farms, but I’ve always wished I had the chance to work on one, even if just for a day.
For someone who, until recently, saw the efforts of their work go out in takeout boxes, the idea of actually investing yourself in something as disciplined – dare I say rewarding? – as farming holds a special kind of allure.
So here I am. As of this writing, I’ve only been here for three days, and I’ve already learned more about farming than in the last 22 years of my life combined. If this continues, I will have achieved exactly what I set out to do on this internship.
As I see it, a journalist’s job is about learning something new every day. I hope three months is enough time to satisfy the long unanswered questions of the little kid who watched the farms pass him by through the car window.