Glenn Powell

Glenn was raised on a family farm near Paris, Brant County. He was active in 4H, Junior Farmers, hockey, baseball and lacrosse, along with the usual run of chores on the family dairy farm.

He graduated from the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC), Guelph (Animal Science, Hon.) While at college he participated in intramural and intercollegiate athletics, College Royal, the campus newspaper, and the drama club.

After graduation Glenn worked for the Ontario Department of Agriculture as an extension agent in Essex County. In 1963, he joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as Farm Commentator, Ontario and Quebec region. This was the beginning of his professional career in journalism – a career that includes more than three decades as on-air host and reporter, radio and TV – and continues today as a freelance writer and communications consultant.

As a National Reporter for CBC Radio News his assignments included Parliament Hill, Ottawa: foreign desks in London and Washington, national elections, political leadership conventions, agriculture, food and environment. He has travelled to and reported from all 10 provinces, many of the States south of the 49th, Mexico and much of western Europe. His stories varied from the Pope’s tour to Hurricane Andrew; from the stand-off at Oka to the tire fire at Hagersville; from acid rain to the ‘fall of the Crow’, from the Free Trade Agreement to the Canada-USSR hockey tournament.

Glenn is a past-president of the University of Guelph Alumni Association, the OAC Alumni Association, the Eastern Canada Farm Writers’ Association and the Canadian Farm Writers’ Federation. He served as an executive member of the OAC Alumni Foundation; he is a former member of the board of directors, and vice-chair, of the Halton Region Conservation Authority; and a member and chair of the Halton Region Agricultural Advisory Committee. He was recently appointed a member of the Halton-Hamilton Source Water Protection Committee.

Glenn lives in Oakville with his wife Stephanie. His hobbies include reading, gardening, golf and golf - but he readily confesses he is not very skilled at the latter two!

Jim Romahn

Jim Romahn’s first article as a farm writer was for the now-defunct Farmer’s Advocate, written in 1962 while he was a journalism student at the University of Western Ontario. His English professor, Elizabeth Waterston, happened to be the wife Doug Waterston, publisher of the magazine, proving that it was not what he knew, but who he knew.

He began reporting for the Kitchener-Waterloo Record in the summer of 1963 and upon graduation in 1965 joined the full-time staff.

In 1968 he was recruited to be the first science writer for the Information Division of Agriculture Canada. At the time the Research Branch was the largest and oldest research organization in Canada with more than 1,000 scientists working at scores of facilities across the nation.

He was soon recruited to work on policy news releases and backgrounders, then became head of media relations which involved merging the English and French press, radio, TV, film and exhibits units.

Jim’s boss, Al Caldwell, ordered him to join the Eastern Canada Farm Writers Association and to volunteer to maintain a membership and mailing list. Agriculture Canada circulated information by mail, free of charge.

When Henri Vandermeulen, freelancer after the Family Herald of Montreal folded, became president of the Canadian Farm Writers Federation, then executive assistant to Agriculture Minister Eugene Whelan, he appointed Jim to prepare and mail CFWF newsletters. The information was gathered by telephone interviewing key members across the nation. The newsletter, together with the annual awards competition, greatly boosted membership. There was only one female member, Alice Switzer of the United Farmers of Alberta.

Jim later served as president of the CFWF.

He rejoined The Record in the fall of 1974 to become its farm reporter and columnist. Ironically, Vandermeulen tried to have Jim disciplined by, or expelled from, the CFWF for a column he wrote about Whelan.

The Record was nominated three times for the Roland Michener Governor-General Awards for Public Service in Journalism and won it twice on the basis of Jim’s work. He has won more than 100 national, regional and farm writer awards.

He also won a Roland Michener fellowship in 1988 to study and freelance report about biotechnology. That fellowship was attached to the universities of Guelph and Waterloo and their joint Biotechnology Centre.

He has served as adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Western Ontario and as a journalism instructor in 1989 with a team of four from the university that went to the University of Nairobi, Kenya, on a CIDA-funded training session journalists.

He left The Record in 1994 to freelance, then joined the staff at Ontario Farmer. He officially retired from there in 2008, but continues to freelance.

He is married to the former Barbara Schweitzer and they have two daughters and three grandchildren.