The Atkinson family lost a father, grandfather and great-grandfather last week.
So did prairie agriculture.
Roy Atkinson was born in February 1924 on a farm near Landis, Sask., that his grandparents had homesteaded 20 years earlier.
He was the first of 10 children that Bob and Elsie Atkinson would have.
He left the farming life for a few years as a young man, returning in the early 1950s to farm with his wife of 52 years, Bette. They raised five children.
Atkinson became heavily involved in farm and rural politics. He was also local activist for the development of universal health care in Saskatchewan.
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A supporter of the co-operative movement, Atkinson sat for a time on the Federated Co-op board, served on the Economic Council of Canada in 1966-67 and spent eight years as a member of the Canadian Council for Rural Development.
Atkinson also served as president of the Saskatchewan Farm Union from 1962-69, and in 1969 became president of the National Farmers Union, a post he held for a decade.
He was a member of the Canadian Wheat Board’s advisory committee and chaired it for the first half of the 1980s. He was also an elected delegate of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool for years.
In 1998, at a time when the prairie pools were dismantling, he helped form and co-chair the Prairie Alliance for the Future, a producer driven grain collection and transportation organization. At the same time, he helped create a Landis area producer grain co-op.
In 1995, when Sask Pool was moving from a farm co-op to a publicly traded company, Atkinson organized a lawsuit that contended that the pool, its board and senior management had “failed to foresee and address the negative consequences that the proposal will have upon the rights of the producer shareholders.”
Atkinson was well known as protest rally organizer and participant on key issues if he believed it would create awareness in politicians or the public.
He moved to Saskatoon after retiring from farming.
Atkinson was inducted into the Saskatchewan Agricultural Hall of Fame and received the Order of Canada for his public efforts.
A memorial reception is scheduled for May 27 at the Delta Bessborough Hotel in Saskatoon.
