Ric retires

The man seems to know everybody and everybody knows him. That was one of my first impressions upon observing Ric Swihart of the Lethbridge Herald at a farm meeting in Taber some 20-odd years ago. He was in the middle of his agricultural reporting career then, and I was just beginning.

Though we have never worked in the same newsroom, Ric and I have maintained contact over the years. Initially we covered ag news in southern Alberta for different newspapers. When I moved to The Western Producer in the early 1990s, I found that Ric was already a well-established freelance contributor of Alberta farm news and I was editing his copy.
Upon my return to southern Alberta in December 2010, Ric was one of the first people I called, for a coffee and a catch-up on events, both agricultural and personal. That’s when he told me about his pending retirement.
On June 1, that retirement became official, and I was able to visit him on that day and of course see him in reportorial action, since he filed stories until the final bell, so to speak.

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He had his preferred spot at the back of the conference room in the Lethbridge Lodge meeting rooms. It is virtually his home away from home, I’d guess, given the popularity of that hotel as a venue for ag-related conferences.
Ric took notes directly into a laptop at that meeting, which likely sped up his writing process. A few notes in tiny notebooks gleaned after the immersion of Alberta Wheat Pool into other grain companies were also the norm.
Ric has always had a prodigious output of copy for the Herald, the Producer and other newspapers of note in southern Alberta and southern Saskatchewan.
He says he became an agricultural writer because he had “neither the money nor the guts to be a farmer.” I don’t know about the money, but it takes some guts to be a reporter in a world that has so many controversies.
Now that The Western Producer has a bureau in Lethbridge, I’m hopeful that we can help to at least partially fill the gaps Ric’s retirement will leave. He has blazed an impressive trail to follow.