A quick check through our papers since spring shows we’ve run a dozen pictures of bovines this season. That includes cows, calves, steers, and bulls. And of course we’ve featured other animals in our photos: horses participating in wagon rides, rodeos, and chuckwagon races, and the occasional sheep, dog, or cat.
Cows and calves are my personal favourites. They usually cooperate when I’m setting up a shot, and they know how to show their good side.
I wasn’t raised rural, but through a series of lucky events I’ve ended up freelancing as an ag writer, mostly for the beef sector. It’s only over the past dozen years that I’ve got muck on my rubber boots.
As a born and raised urbanite, I consider it an enormous privilege to learn about agriculture from an up-close-and-personal vantage point. As many of you know far better than I do, it’s an enormous field where the learning never stops.
For city folk, the learning sometimes never starts. It’s not that they don’t care—producers may be pleased to know that whenever the weather changes, people in the city will comment on whether it’s “good for the farmers”—but ag isn’t always front-of-mind.
Neither, for that matter, are nickel mining or shoe manufacturing. We need ag, but it’s good to know we can trust the producers and the systems that bring our food to us.
But learning matters. Where there is a knowledge gap, there is always someone aiming to fill it, and that’s where telling the stories and sharing good information are important.
Our ag stories in Respect aren’t the kind of information producers rely on from week to week. Our aim is to tell Lakelanders’ stories to each other and shed a little light on what everyone’s up to. If your roots (like mine) aren’t deep in the soil, we hope the stories of the farm sector can bring you closer to the land, and maybe bring us all a bit closer together.
If you’ve moved off the farm, we hope you enjoy reading about what has changed and what hasn’t over the years.
And sometimes, nothing raises a smile quite like a picture of a cow.