By about this time next week — October 20 to be exact — I will be retired. After about 50 years of writing and editing and rarely missing a deadline, October 20 is my last day of full-time employment.
October 20 is my birthday. I will be turning 71 (where the heck did that number come from?) and I have decided it is a good day to wrap up this full-time writing career. I am so looking forward to the morning of October 21, waking up and saying, “I have nothing to do today — there is no deadline looming out there waiting to be met.” That warm fuzzy feeling may only last for a day, but at least I will have that.
I have been a writer and editor with Grainews and previously Country Guide (same company) for more than 30 years. I was a writer with Alberta Agriculture in Edmonton for a couple of years before signing on with Country Guide in Calgary in 1987. I joined Grainews as a field editor in 2005.
Read Also
Beef demand drives cattle and beef markets higher
Prices for beef cattle continue to be strong across the beef value chain, although feedlot profitability could be challenging by the end of 2025, analyst Jerry Klassen says.
And it has been a great run. I have learned enough over these past three decades that I may just go farming myself and get rich. Why not? How hard could it be? On the other hand, have I learned nothing from farm retirement/succession specialists such as Merle Good — get out while you can still walk, or some advice similar to that.
But seriously, it has been a great career. I started out working as a newspaper reporter in about 1970, and then in the mid-1980s switched over to writing about agriculture. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an agricultural writer, but the idea caught my attention.
My humble beginning into agricultural writing began while I was a reporter with the Lethbridge Herald. Somehow, I connected with Tom Bradley, publisher with Farm Light and Power in Regina. I agreed to do a freelance article for that publication. Obviously, this is seared into my memory. I believe the first article I did was a feature story with farmer Don Opp at Claresholm, about an hour north of Lethbridge, talking to him about this new concept in the early 1980s of conservation farming. I didn’t have a clue.
So what is an air seeder, what is a cultivator, what do you mean by “keep your stubble up”? I had grown up on a dairy farm in eastern Ontario, but I was painfully ignorant about anything to do with grain farming and Prairie agriculture. Somehow we got through it.
Thirty-some years later, I’m still lost when they talk about building algorithms to do facial recognition to track livestock, or who can manage field crops without georeferenced data collection that includes field imagery collected and analyzed but may or may not be integrated fully into decision making. And the GPS resolution, at a minimum, is assisted by the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS). You know me, I’m all over that stuff.
October 20 I’m retired, but I’m not planning to disappear from writing entirely. I know a few other fossils still active in the agriculture industry. I’m thinking if they are still at it, and as long as my mind holds out, I will see where I can fit in the occasional writing project.
If asked what’s been great about this career, it wasn’t the crops and livestock. It is terribly cliche but I have been so fortunate to work for, to work with, and to meet and interview just an amazing group of people. There has been the odd pain in the ass, but the vast majority have been the finest people I’d ever care to meet.
The one thing that’s a bit alarming the longer I’m in this business — I’ve talked to people when they first started their career, some of them are now retired. And in other circumstances, I remember talking to young farmers in the 1980s, now I am talking to their children as they continue the family farm, and if I hang in there it won’t be long before I’ll be talking to the grandchildren — the third generation. Yikes. I can see me getting out to a barley field somewhere and these young whippersnappers decide to hide my walker … and then where will I be?
