The hall of fame on Monday unofficially announced its 2018 group of inductees, ahead of its annual meeting Wednesday in Portage la Prairie and an official induction ceremony to be held in June.

The hall’s 2018 class includes John Morriss, Peter Pakosh, Fred Streich and Bill Streich.

Morriss, whose first job as a farm writer was with Grainews in 1975, returned to agriculture journalism in the 1980s as publisher and editor of the Manitoba Co-operator, then owned by Manitoba Pool Elevators.

He later co-founded Farmers Independent Weekly in 2002 before returning to the Co-operator, now part of Glacier FarmMedia, in 2007 as editorial director for Glacier’s Farm Business Communications division.

Now semi-retired, Morriss was hailed Monday by the hall of fame for his “significant contributions to agriculture journalism.” He has long been active in Farm Radio International, the Manitoba Farm Writers and Broadcasters Association and the Canadian Federation of Farm Writers.

Pakosh, who developed several farm equipment innovations before his death in 1999, grew up on a Manitoba farm but was working as a draftsman for Massey-Harris in Toronto when he developed the idea for the grain auger used by combine harvesters.

When Massey rejected the idea, Pakosh began selling it directly to Prairie farmers, then took it to co-found the Hydraulic Engineering Company, later Versatile Manufacturing, in 1947.

The company moved west to Winnipeg in 1952 and rebranded as Versatile in 1963, expanding into field sprayers, harrow bars, swathers and, ultimately, four-wheel-drive and bi-directional tractors. Versatile later became part of New Holland in 1987 and is now the farm tractor arm of Winnipeg’s Buhler Industries.

The late Bill and Fred Streich, who hailed from Beausejour and Niverville respectively, “worked tirelessly to come up with changes and improvements to the way combines operate,” the hall of fame said.

Their best-known such improvement was the development of the rotating screened drum to separate kernels from chaff, improving the quality of separation over the vibrating conveyor systems then commonly used in mechanical threshers.

The rotary separator was put commercially to work in a small run of combines produced by Western Roto Thresh Ltd. in Saskatoon in the 1970s. The company was unsuccessful but the rotary separator ultimately morphed into the axial flow technology used in modern combines.

The 2018 class will be inducted into the hall of fame at a ceremony June 18 at Winnipeg’s Victoria Inn. That event will also include the announcement of the Red River Exhibition’s 2018 Farm Family of the Year and presentations of the Red River Exhibition Foundation’s Agriculture and Agri-Food scholarships. — AGCanada.com Network

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FBC, an arm of Glacier FarmMedia, earned a total of 10 gold, silver and bronze awards on Oct. 1 from the Canadian Farm Writers Federation (CFWF), which held its annual conference that weekend in Saskatoon.

FBC’s Quebec farm journal, Le Bulletin des agriculteurs, also earned three awards on Oct. 7 from CFWF’s Quebec counterpart, the Association des communicateurs et redacteurs de l’agroalimentaire (ACRA). This year’s ACRA annual meeting was held at Saint-Jean-de-Matha, west of Trois-Rivieres.

Le Bulletin won the Prix Roger-Blais, a prize honouring farm newsletters, for its July 6 e-newsletter. Le Bulletin writer Marie-Josee Parent also earned two Prix Moise Cossette awards, one for technical feature writing and the other a special “jurors’ favourite” prize.

At the CFWF awards banquet in Saskatoon, Grainews editor Leeann Minogue and Country Guide contributor Gerald Pilger earned the gold and silver Frank Jacobs Award respectively for best press column.

Writing in Country Guide, Jay Whetter, editor of the Canola Council of Canada’s Canola Watch, and Canadian Cattlemen contributor Madeleine Baerg earned the CFWF’s gold and silver Jack Cram Award respectively for monthly press reporting.

Manitoba Co-operator reporter Shannon VanRaes, as part of a Glacier FarmMedia analysis of the proposed Canada/EU free trade agreement, and Alberta Farmer Express reporter Jennifer Blair won the CFWF’s gold and bronze Q.H. Martinson Award for weekly press reporting. VanRaes also earned the silver John Phillips Award for news photography.

Country Guide field editor Ralph Pearce and Grainews columnist Sarah Weigum also earned the CFWF’s silver and bronze Peter Lewington Award for best technical feature, while Country Guide contributor Angela Lovell won the silver Dick Beamish Award for press feature writing.

CFWF, ACRA and the Eastern Canada Farm Writers’ Association (ECFWA) plan to hold their next annual conferences jointly in September 2017 in Quebec City.

FBC’s Grainews, Country Guide and Manitoba Co-operator are also nominated this year for a total of four Canadian Online Publishing Awards (COPAs), to be announced next month in Toronto. — AGCanada.com Network

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The Manitoba Co-operator’s website, ManitobaCooperator.ca, part of Glacier Media’s Farm Business Communications division in Winnipeg, won silver for Best Media Website, coming in second behind SalonMagazine.ca in the Blue division (scholarly, farm and B2B publishing).

The Best Media Website award goes to “the media website that best serves its target audience through content, design, navigation and overall reader experience on any device that includes desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones.” A “media” website is a site bearing the brand of a media property such as a newspaper, magazine or broadcast outlet.

ManitobaCooperator.ca’s second silver in the Blue division came in the Best Editorial Packaging category, for “the digital property that provides an editorial message that meets the highest journalist(ic) standards in serving (its) intended audience.”

The site finished second in Best Editorial Packaging behind foreign policy and international affairs site OpenCanada.org.

ManitobaCooperator.ca was also a finalist in the Blue division for Best Video Content, while sister site AGCanada.com was a finalist in the same division for Best News Coverage.

The COPAs, an annual juried awards competition run by Mississauga-based publishing industry magazine Masthead, were held Thursday night at Toronto’s Phoenix Concert Theatre.

Manitobans earning COPAs Thursday night also included Winnipeg-based Canada’s History, which won gold for Best Email Newsletter Design and Engagement; Winnipeg web company Modern Earth, which won silver for Best Website Design, for its site for law firm Pollock and Co., both in the Red (consumer magazines and websites) division; and the Winnipeg Free Press, which earned silvers for Best Editorial Packaging and Best Infographic/Data Visualization in the Green (news) division.

Another Glacier Media site, Vitamin Daily, earned silver in the Red division for Best Use of Social Media.

The Co-operator site also earned national silver, the Henry Heald Award for best World Wide Website, at the Canadian Farm Writers Federation awards in Calgary in September. — AGCanada.com Network

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Rance replaces John Morriss, who continues as associate publisher of Farm Business Communications and who will be working in a new capacity developing Glacier FarmMedia’s online grain and livestock reporting and analysis services.

Rance will oversee the print and online news, feature and content delivery for all publications in the FBC family, which include the Manitoba Co-operator, Alberta Farmer Express, Grainews, Le Bulletin des agriculteurs, Country Guide, Canadian Cattlemen and this website. She will continue as editor of the Manitoba Co-operator.

Rance has worked in agricultural journalism for more than three decades, beginning her career in daily newspapers before joining the Western Producer and later moving to the Co-operator. Morriss and Rance were among six partners who formed the Farmers’ Independent Weekly, which operated for five years before merging with the Co-operator in 2007.

Morriss, also a career agricultural journalist, was formerly publisher of the Co-operator and director of information for the Canadian Wheat Board.

Glacier FarmMedia is the agricultural division of Glacier Media Inc., an information communications company focused on the provision of primary and essential information and related services through print, electronic and online media.

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