This is my last issue at Country Guide. Retirement starts today. It begins practically the moment I hit “Send” on this column.
No one could work at this job without a sense of the magazine’s history and its deep connections to Canadian farm families over the past century. I routinely get calls saying, “I’m cleaning out my grandparents’ house. What should I do with the old Country Guides they tucked away with the family things?”
There was a time, too, when I’d get beautifully handwritten letters, saying, “I learned to cook and sew from your magazine. What’s the use of you now?” So much has changed. And, sadly, those letters have changed too. They have stopped coming. Their generation is fading.
Read Also
Editor’s Note: No pressure
What is your playbook going into this year’s crop? Not an easy question to answer right now, given the global…
But, of course, in agriculture, any look backwards soon shifts to a look ahead, and I confess that I’m like “seniors” all across the countryside, feeling so fortunate to hand over the reins to a new generation that sees such opportunity.
Yes, there are challenges too. Those who follow — Lisa Guenther and April Stewart — will have to prove their mettle. But they’re confident, and as you will see in coming issues, you have every reason to be too.
It leaves me wondering what to say as I leave. No one wants a long list of thank you’s, so instead, I thought I would turn back to an editorial I wrote in 2017. Here’s what I said:
“I’ve mentioned once or twice in past that I’ve toyed with the idea of Country Guide publishing a series of business books based on the strategic insights we glean from the farmers in our stories.
“And just to be clear… I don’t mean books for farmers to read.
“I mean books for readers in just about every other economic sector because of the great value their thinking would bring.”
Farming is fundamentally a job of decision-making, and increasingly, as we know, those decisions are big, and they are more complex than our city cousins have any idea about.
I get why farm groups portray farmers as gentle neighbours rather than as professionals, but in the interests of agriculture, shouldn’t we begin that transition? Wouldn’t a glossy stack of these books in an airport bookshop score some serious hits?
Well, here I am again talking like someone at the beginning of my career. Can you turn that off when you retire? Can you want to turn it off?
I can’t leave without thanking John Morriss and Laura Rance-Unger. And I want to thank Glacier FarmMedia too. I won’t thank anyone else by name, though. There are simply too many… we’ll catch up off-line.
And that goes for you too. Maybe we actually will meet at the airport. But for today, I send my best wishes and will close the way I always have. Are we getting it right? Let me know at [email protected].
