I can’t help it. I’ve watched enough French-language beer commercials that anytime I see the number 50 out in the wild, my first thought is to exclaim “Cinquante!” in an outside voice. My second thought is to not do that, because that would just make the birthday or anniversary party weird.
With that earworm now lodged in place, we here at Grainews welcome the year 2025 — marking our 50th anniversary in print.
Now, our actual birthday doesn’t come around until this fall. In October 1975, the first edition of the paper rolled off the press with a front-page message from United Grain Growers’ (UGG) president Mac Runciman, in which he declared its purpose as “to provide information on a regular basis to local board members, elevator managers and farmers in general about farming and the affairs of the company.”
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Runciman, the Scottish-born southeastern Saskatchewan farmer who relocated to Winnipeg to head up UGG, noted in his message that “the growing and selling of grain looks easy to an outsider but skill, knowledge, experience and an endless flow of information are required if it is to be done well.” The job of Grainews, he wrote, was to “interpret farm policy developments; to provide more information about your company’s products and services; and to bring you news and facts about markets and marketing and the many other factors that affect the success of farmers.”
And the objective of UGG’s board, he said, was “to make this the best farm newspaper available by bringing you straight news about all aspects of farming and reporting it in a straightforward way.”
UGG was no stranger to farm publishing, having created The Grain Growers’ Guide, which has since merged, morphed and evolved into what’s now known as Country Guide. But Grainews was intended to be something different, and it, too, evolved.
Within a few years of that initial 12-pager, it became much like the Grain Growers’ Guide in that rather than just providing a few pages of grain pricing tips and marketing advice, it chucked everything but the proverbial kitchen sink at Prairie grain growers for their reading pleasure, reaching out also to on-farm mechanics and gearheads, beef cattle producers and homemakers. It made regional celebrities out of its columnists such as the late Lyle Walker, Alf Bryan, Les Henry and Boyd Anderson, among many others. And in that odd niche Grainews inhabited within the farm press before the internet arrived, it also became a go-to for invective on federal and Prairie politics and policy — in particular, the Canadian Wheat Board — adding even more edge to debates that ultimately changed the Prairie grain business as we now know it, for better, worse or otherwise.
Meanwhile, as a farm kid without much access to daily newspapers’ funny pages, I was of course snapping up Grainews mainly to get my fix of Far Side cartoons. When I arrived in the Grainews office as Andy Sirski’s editorial assistant in the late 1990s, that made me an employee of UGG, which would shortly merge into Agricore United, which would then sell its publishing arm to Glacier Ventures, creating the shop we know as Glacier FarmMedia today.
And through all that change, Grainews has kept evolving, in print and now online, further in favour of what turned out to be its particular strength — namely, practical and straightforward information on the work of farming itself. For however much of the past half century you’ve been reading, we’re glad and grateful you chose to be with us out here in this “endless flow of information” and look forward to the next cinquante.
As always, contact me with your questions, comments and/or concerns.
Corrected
In the article “WeedSeeker 2 offers spot spraying retrofit for existing sprayers” in the Dec. 3, 2024 print edition (page 17), you’ll see some spots where we incorrectly refer to the WeedSeeker 2 system as “GreenSeeker 2,” and incorrectly spelled the last name of PTx Trimble product team manager Justin Prickel throughout. Our colleague in cyberspace Greg Berg has gone into Grainews.ca and corrected the online version of that article for us, but let the record show we regret those errors and any confusion.
Think pink
Lastly, here’s a quick follow-up to an item from our Oct. 29, 2024 issue (“A conveyor of a different colour,” page 24) about AGI’s fundraiser for the Canadian Cancer Society, in which the company held an online auction for a new custom-painted bright pink Batco conveyor. Now, personally, if I had unlimited funds, I wouldn’t hesitate to have my car painted that same colour so I’d never have to search for it in a parking lot. That’s why I admire such bold colour choices elsewhere.
The winning bid for the conveyor came from Scott Bolt and the employees of Bolt Seed Farm at Wynyard, Sask. They bid $65,100, and lined up another $1,275 in public contributions, for a total of $66,375. Congratulations to the Bolts and everyone involved in the fundraising effort.
