special reports editor
A quarter of a century ago, a young CBC reporter sat across the table from United States agriculture secretary Earl Butz and heard predictions about an amazing future for agriculture.
There are two emerging power centres in the world, Butz told Sandy Cushon: petro-power epitomized by OPEC and agri-power, soon to create amazing prices and demand in a food-hungry world.
Wow, Cushon must have thought, as he was embarking in 1975 on a career as host of CBC’s Winnipeg-based Country Canada. This is going to be an interesting ride.
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It was a time when economists were freely predicting $20 wheat and a world population growing so quickly that farmers would be paid top dollar for what they could produce.
It would be a fascinating time to be an agricultural journalist, covering an unending success story.
Twenty-five years later, Cushon is retiring from the job and he marvels at how wrong that prediction was.
Instead of covering the rise of agriculture and food production as a centre of economic power, he has watched and chronicled the decline of the sector. At times, it has seemed more of a death watch than a rocket ride.
“Nobody talks about agri-power now,” he said last week. “What I’ve seen instead is agriculture and farmers just hanging on.”
Year after year, this farm boy from Oxbow, Sask., took his cameras and crew to rural areas across Canada and around the world.
Year after year, the stories he reported were of the latest crisis, the threats to rural society, the desperate and often heroic struggles by rural citizens to survive.
“There is no doubt that over those years, rural areas and agriculture have become weaker,” he said.
Cushon sees the changing status of the agriculture minister in the federal cabinet as an illustration.
“When I started, Gene Whelan was the minister and he seemed and sounded central. Now, the agriculture minister, like the sector, seems much more marginalized. And that is not a reflection on whoever occupies the job.”
Even Cushon’s own longtime employer reflects that change. In the 1970s, CBC had a string of dedicated agriculture reporters, noon farm shows and a fulltime Ottawa reporter.
Most of those positions are long gone.
Yet he came out of his career with admiration for the determination of many farmers to hang on, to fight back.
“It’s true that if you look at the economics, year after year, any ‘sensible person’ would just get out, but there is something about the lifestyle that keeps them hanging on,” he said. “It’s amazing and I cannot explain it.”
He won’t have to any more. In early October, at the start of the new Country Canada season, Cushon will pass on the torch to a new host.
Then, for at least three months before he decides what to do, “I’m not going to travel on an airplane, eat airplane food or stay in a hotel.”
Well, that’s not entirely true.
At the end of October, Cushon will be gathering with a few other survivors of the Carleton University honors journalism class of 1970 to celebrate 30 years of memories.
I’ll be there too.
