When new writers ask how I decide whether to run their pieces, I don’t need many words. “Farmers are smarter than you think,” I say. “If you don’t show that you know that, I’m not buying.”
Smart farmers are a challenge for everyone who works in agriculture. There’s no end run around it. Any farmer can tell in a heartbeat if the person they’re talking to gets it or not. It’s the first thing that really gets communicated, and it can also be the last.
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It isn’t about the lingo of agriculture, or at least not only that. Increasingly, it’s about smarts and about bringing value.
Smart farmers are also a challenge for farm media, and the ag journalists I read across Canada are thinking every day about how best to be relevant and helpful to an audience that is so tough to keep up with.
That’s why being judged by them to be worthy of awards is something that matters to us.
Under the leadership of editorial director
John Morriss, our FBC team has just
returned from the Canadian Farm Writers
Federation annual meeting with an armful of awards and plagues. COUNTRY GUIDE staffers won gold, silver and bronze, sweeping the awards for monthly press reporting. In the category for technical writing too we won gold and silver.
And I’ve been told I should toot our horn about it.
Why should you care?
I care because I get to work with a top-flight team that includes associate editors Gord Gilmour and Andrew Douglas, contributing editor Maggie Van Camp and freelancers (including Jeanine Moyer who won silver for her COUNTRY GUIDE writing) and it’s great to see that others esteem them as highly as I do.
We talk every week about this magazine’s vision, namely the core COUNTRY GUIDE belief that it’s the intelligence and energy of farmers that is driving the future of agriculture, not the breakthroughs from corporate or university labs — important though those are.
We talk (well, you’re right, we actually listen) to designer Jenelle Jensen about how to make this vision come alive on the page, and we talk with (i. e. listen to) Diane Gray, who puts wheels under the whole process and makes sure that at the end of the day, there’s a magazine in your mailbox.
It’s the vision and the team that were recognized by the writing awards. But, of course, the real test is with you. Are we getting it right? Do you want us to continue our business focus?
Let us know. You can reach me at [email protected],or 519 674-1449.
