A former editor and publisher of The Western Producer is among the five 2009 inductees to the Saskatchewan Agricultural Hall of Fame.
Bob Phillips, who died May 6, 2006, will be posthumously inducted into the hall at a ceremony next August. The announcement was made at Canadian Western Agribition last week.
The other inductees are: Sinclair Harrison, best known as former president of the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities and chair of the Farmer Rail Car Coalition; Audrey Horkoff, a former Agribition president and co-chair of the provincial government’s Action Committee on the Rural Economy; Robert Zentner, a research economist at the Semiarid Prairie Agricultural Research Centre in Swift Current; and John Buchan, a former Saskatchewan agriculture special crops specialist who was instrumental in establishing the pulse industry.
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Buchan, who died Nov. 27, 2006, also has a Western Producer connection. His wife, Deborah Sproat, was the paper’s Regina reporter until 1993.
Sproat said her husband would have been honoured to be included.
“He had a lot of respect for the agricultural hall of fame,” she said.
Phillips was with the Producer from 1973 to 1986 and was responsible for establishing staff reporters in bureaus in Ottawa and Western Canada. He had previously headed Saskatchewan Wheat Pool’s research division.
Horkoff said she was surprised to be nominated.
“You just go about your work and you don’t think about things like this,” she said.
The hall is housed in the Western Development Museum in Saskatoon. The first inductees were named in 1972.
