Next week is going to be a big one here at The Western Producer.
The paper is turning 100 on Aug. 27, and the Aug. 24 issue will be our opportunity to kick off the year with a bang.
The edition will begin with a story about the paper’s first 100 years by former Western Producer markets editor D’Arce McMillan.
A few weeks ago I had been wondering how D’Arce was making out with his research and intended to ask him about it while having supper at his place. The history books piled on his kitchen table gave me my answer.
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His story will start on the front page and jump to pages 4-5. It is well worth the read.
But that won’t be the end of it.
Agriculture Canada had a display at the recent Ag in Motion farm show near Langham, Sask., featuring the wheat varieties that helped farmers turn Western Canada into the world’s breadbasket, starting with Red Fife and ending with Starbuck. It was a hands-on history lesson covering the same time period shared by The Western Producer.
Ed White, one of the newspaper’s Winnipeg reporters, will have a story and photos about those history plots.
Betty Ann Deobald, one of the writers of our weekly TEAM column in the Farm Living section, will write about the role that the Producer has played over the last 100 years in improving the lives of prairie farm families.
And Doug Ferguson, our Calgary reporter, will kick off his series looking at National Film Board documentaries about the Prairies that have been produced over the decades. Doug’s first column will focus on a pioneering film from 1954 about an Alberta cowboy taming a wild horse.
As well, the Editorial Notebook column is going to change, starting in the Aug. 24 issue. We will be using it to take a deeper look at specific editions of the newspaper, starting with the Aug. 27, 1923, issue and then jumping ahead every two years for the next year.
And this will just be the beginning as we publish a variety of articles over the next year looking back at the last century and looking ahead at the years to come.
We hope you will enjoy it all.
