Some 30 years ago, working in Ottawa for the Agricultural Institute of Canada, I was invited to join the Canadian Farm Writers Federation.
I’m proud to say that I’ve maintained my membership more or less continuously since. This past weekend, I attended the CFWF convention in Saskatoon. As it turned out, there were few of the “old crowd,” but a lot of new faces to meet and greet. During the course of the convention we were all asked to take a look at a book of pictures from past conventions to see if we could help with identification.
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Towards the back of the book there were a number of slides and black-and-white photos from conventions in the early ’70s. Ah, nostalgia time.
There was George Price and George Atkins, Bob Knowles and Glenn Powell, all of the former CBC noon farm broadcasts. Atkins and Powell worked out of Toronto, Knowles was from Regina and for many years Price was the CBC farm man in Ottawa.
Jim Romahn was there, a farm writer I worked with at Ag Canada before I left for other pastures in Ottawa and he returned home to the Kitchener-Waterloo Record and several national farm writing awards. There was Don Baron and Harold Dodds of the Country Guide, Allan Caldwell of Ag Canada and Frank Jacobs of Canadian Cattlemen.
I was having a grand time until one of the conference organizers told me how glad she was to see me “doing the book” as she just knew that I would know the ones from “years ago.” I wanted to tell her that I’d been quite young all those “years ago” but she had moved on and I went back to my memories.
I recalled Joe Scanlon, head of the Journalism Department at Carleton University, once told me he especially liked talking to farm writers because they were the most professional journalists he had ever dealt with.
They had a deep knowledge and love of their subject, he said; they were specialists who had their collective fingers on the pulse of agriculture and were able to write and broadcast about it in everyday terms for their farm audience.
Unfortunately, over the years the number of farm writers, like the number of farmers, has dwindled. The professionalism remains, however, and the farm focus. It’s probably past time for the focus to shift and to put some of that professionalism to work interpreting agriculture and the farm scene for the urban audience.
