Tribute to a border runner
Last year, in Minneapolis, I was honoured to receive the wheat grower’s ’shovel of gratitude’ for my work on the wheat board file. This year I’ve been asked to pass it on to another individual who I believe is truly deserving of recognition by his peers.
It’s never easy deciding on who that individual should be, as there are many, people who work very hard every year on making our industry better and improving the lives of Western Canadian farmers. There are a number of people the Wheatgrowers considered for this years award but in the end we kept coming back to one name - Jim Chatney-
With Jim retiring as a farmer elected wheat board director this year after three successful terms in that position we thought that this was the perfect time to honour Jim’s service to his fellow farmers.
Sometime before Christmas I was walking through a shopping mall and a poster for a new World War II movie caught my attention, the tag line under the title read, “Freedom begins, with an act of defiance“. I immediately thought of Jim Chatney and all of the other farmers who decided to engage in acts of civil disobedience, by running the border with their own grain .
In my mind that’s really how Jim’s story starts, with an act of defiance. He was a farmer from Alberta who was tired of being forced to sell his wheat and barley to a government monopoly and he was determined to show his fellow farmers and the world how unjust this really is in a so-called free society.
13 years ago, in the spring of 1996, Jim joined a small group of farmers at the Alberta/Montana border. Some had tandems, some had semi’s, some were in pickup trucks. Jim had the family van and in the back of it he had something truly dangerous, a weapon of mass anarchy and destruction, … a bag of Wheat.
He took that bag of wheat across to the US and he donated it to a 4-h club. That was Jim’s act of defiance, that was his act of civil disobedience, and that is what ultimately got him put in a