This would be the perfect week to employ the decades of experience, insightfulness and crisp, clean writing of Adrian Ewins.
The committee making recommendations for the concrete steps necessary to end the Canadian Wheat Board’s monopoly has just released its report, and it’s tricky stuff that Adrian could have dealt with easily and succinctly explained it to readers.
And Friday the University of Manitoba’s Transport Institute is holding its annual Fields on Wheels conference, something that will delve deep into grain transportation minutiae that would intimidate most reporters, even ones at agricultural newspapers like ours. Adrian often covered this conference and knew most of the people who attend it, whether farmers or grain company officials or academics or railway vice presidents.
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But, as some of you already know but others do not yet, Adrian died last Wednesday night, of a cancer he has been fighting for longer than the 17 years I have known him, and those of us who worked closely with him are grappling with the reality of his passing and are feeling keenly the loss of a friend, a colleague and a skilled fellow professional. For us, this loss is very personal.
But it’s also a loss for all of our farmer-readers. Adrian diligently trod the grain industry beat for three decades and kept readers abreast all the bewildering changes that have hit it, managing to make stories about difficult and complex topics readable, interesting and intelligible. No one else has covered that beat better, and the Western Producer and our reporters are going to have to work hard to fill in the enormous gaps he leaves.
Over the years he interviewed thousands of people and spoke to thousands of farmers. So you may have had a personal connection with him. But even if you never spoke to him, his stories made up part of the reality you lived in, and that reality is now different and poorer without him.
