When one is asked to talk about themselves there is a great desire to weave a fantastical tale of being born in a land far, far away, from humble roots, and fast forwarding to some level of greatness.

That of course is rarely the case.

To begin with Tisdale, SK, yes the one which was famous for a time as ‘The Land of Rape and Honey’, is hardly a land far, far away.

However given it was famed for yellow fields of rape and the production of honey, it might have been a somewhat unusual place to grow up on a pig farm.

Or, maybe not so unusual since that was back in the 1960s when most farms were still mixed operations where producers had a few pigs, likely some cattle, and of course grain and oilseeds in the fields.

My Dad’s land was predominantly to grow feed for the pigs, a small registered herd of Yorkshires.

That was of course the ultimate issue with the farm, three quarters of land and maybe 40 sows was small even then, and small operations grow larger or they generally disappear.

While it would take until I was past my teens, the farm disappeared.

So too did the village of Clashmoor, the first address I recall. The elevator closed, the store burned, the post office shut its doors. In time the rail line was pulled up. Today not a building remains.

They call such things progress, although it is to me a progress with a high cost attached.

In the time between birth in 1960, and the end of the farm I would have some pigs of my own, Lacombe and Berkshire.

I wish I still had the Lacombe’s, a made in Canada breed that today is considered critically endangered by Rare Breeds Canada. I have always believed in preserving rare breed genetics and to lose one of only a handful of livestock breeds developed in our country.

But eventually I knew off-farm income was required.

I had happened to win a sports trivia contest in the local newspaper, and when The Recorder found itself short a reporter when the boss was headed on holidays, they asked me if I would cover sports for a couple of weeks.

That was about 30 years ago, and I’m still in the newspaper business.

The two weeks turned into two years in Tisdale, the job expanding beyond sports to include agriculture.

On a whim I sent a story on some cattle farm I visited to the then ‘World of Beef’ and they bought it.

That led me to send out more and more stories, and over the years I’ve had articles in more than a 100 publications from Australia, to Germany to Wales and the U.S.

My background in farming would open the door to a job on staff with The Enterprise in Yorkton. I’ve remained in that position through five ownerships, a buy-out, name change and now editor at Yorkton This Week.

Through it all I still self-assign agriculture stories to myself. It is interesting to reflect that I began writing an opinion column of farming when I arrived in Yorkton, and have pounded out 500 words a week, 52 weeks a year for 28 years, or about 728,000 words. There are 587,287 words in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Somewhere along the way I found the time to write a few books too, but not on farming. Skating the Edge was my first book, a collection of short stories on hockey published in 2001. The hockey collection opened the door to being offered a book on Saskatchewan hockey. Guts and Go: Great Saskatchewan Hockey Stories was the result, followed by the sequel Guts and Go Overtime: More Great Saskatchewan Hockey Stories. Five pulp hero fiction books would be self-published as well.

Away from the keyboard I have too many hobbies for the amount of free time I have. I love to read, about 100 books a year, (westerns, hard-boiled detectives and Sherlock Holmes pastiches), love board games such as hive, arimaa, international checkers and tak, and fish when I can get away, and watch too much sports – go Roughriders, Rush and Jets. I’ve also become an avid disc golfer, and find myself president of the Parkland Association of Disc Golf which represents 20-plus courses within 125 kilometres of Yorkton. It is essentially my second full-time job, except it doesn’t pay.

Oh yes I am married, second time, and have a grown daughter and son from my first marriage. •

— By Calvin Daniels