Journalists are focused on agriculture here at the Producer, and efforts to bring readers the latest agricultural news each week keeps us busy.
But despite our interest and dedication to all news agricultural, I suspect some of us watch media frenzies surrounding big non-agricultural news events and think how exciting it would be to cover them.
A recent example: Wouldn’t it be great to interview a Canadian hero, the pilot who successfully landed a jet airliner after its engines ran out of fuel?
On other occasions, I think our agricultural focus is a strange kind of relief, freeing us as it does from the boredom or the prurience or the grief of international news events that we would otherwise be compelled to cover.
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There was no agricultural angle to the O.J. Simpson trial, or the hijinks of former United States president Bill Clinton, or the death of Princess Diana, for example.
But the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11 transcended all that.
It was an event so monstrous that it crossed all the boundaries – between countries, between strangers, between types of news and ways of reporting.
Last week we had coverage of how the attacks affected agriculture in the short term. This week and in weeks to come, we’ll have news on the longer term effects. As a stone dropped in a pool of water creates ever widening ripples, so will the terrorist acts of Sept. 11 affect world events.
Last week we learned of some direct agricultural connections relative to the bombings. Colleagues in the North American Agricultural Journalists association informed us that John Ogonowski, pilot of American Airlines Flight 11 to Los Angeles, which hit the World Trade Centre, was also a farmer.
He farmed near Dracut, Massachusetts, and helped organize a program for immigrant farmers from Cambodia. He donated land to the project, plowed and harrowed the growing site, set up a greenhouse and an irrigation system. He did all this while working full time as a pilot. He left behind a wife and three kids.
Another direct ag connection: A farmers’ market at the base of the World Trade Centre was wiped out in the attack.
All participating producers survived, but they lost their displays, vehicles, produce and cash, and a market that reportedly earned some of them about $3,500 each day of the two-day weekly market.
We all heard references, before Sept. 11, to the “global community.” This tragedy has shown us what the term means.
