'Good afternoon and good farming': Long-time Sask. agriculture reporter Jim Smalley retires

Jim Smalley, the Saskatchewan radio legend has called it a career after half a century of reporting on the agriculture beat.

April 28th marked Smalley’s final show on CKRM. Farm leaders, long-time friends and listeners brought gifts to the radio station to mark the occasion.

“I’ve had fifty years of broadcasting so I feel good about it,” Smalley told CTV News.

Smalley worked the agriculture beat, first at CKCK before moving onto CKRM.

“I came from the farm so I had a very good knowledge, a good basic knowledge of farming but I learned a lot as we went,” he said.

“You know, technology changed so radically over the last fifty years.”

Nearly his entire career was spent as an agriculture news reporter.

“Somebody working in the same job for fifty years and in the same place for forty, your parents and grandparents may have had that happen to them but that doesn’t happen very often in this day and age,” Andrew Dawson, news director for CKRM, said.

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Smalley’s tenure at the station was so long, many of his work colleagues first heard his show when they were children, growing up on the farm.

“Jim Smalley was on, doing Ag news, so I’d be talking to Dad saying ‘what are we going to do this Saturday? Let’s do this and this’ and he’d say; ‘Hush. Jim Smalley’s on,” Colin Lovequist, an announcer at CKRM, recalled.

Smalley was a familiar voice in tractor cabs across the province.

“His show is always on in the tractor or in the combine,” Todd Lewis, vice president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, said.

“Be it the Ag markets, you always pick up information.”

For Smalley, he just appreciated serving his audience.

“My viewers and listeners I’d love to say thank you. Thank you for supporting me. Thank you for listening all these years,” he said during his final broadcast.

As always, Smalley wrapped up his half century of broadcasting with a familiar sign off.

“So I guess it’s one more time, good afternoon and good farming.”