FARM 2025: With a new editor at the helm, 'The Rural Voice' turns the page for its 50th anniversary
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN and SCOTT STEPHENSON
In last year’s Salute to Agriculture, The Citizen’s Scott Stephenson celebrated The Rural Voice for its decades of telling the region’s agricultural stories and tales of the rural way of life.
He didn’t know it at the time, but he was doing that story just as the beloved magazine - which is part of the North Huron Publishing Inc. collection of publications alongside The Citizen and Stops Along the Way - was about to turn a corner. Long-time Editor Lisa Boonstoppel-Pot, shortly after that story was published, decided to step back from the magazine into a form of semi-retirement to pursue other interests and now, as the storied publication marks its 50th anniversary this year, esteemed agricultural voice Mel Luymes has taken the reins and will guide The Rural Voice through its semicentennial and beyond.
The Citizen sat down with Luymes to talk about her background, her work in the agricultural field and her vision for the future of The Rural Voice.
Growing up, Luymes said she was always aware of The Rural Voice. Her family received it and she read it regularly, so it was omnipresent in her life before she even knew exactly how omnipresent it would become years later.
She went on to reference the publication in her university studies as she focused on agricultural media and its role in the world. However, even as a young reader, what attracted her to the publication, she said, was its lack of a slant or an angle. The Rural Voice just told the stories of the people and the businesses of rural Ontario and other publications, even some of the biggest ones, always seemed to have a slant, she said.
Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean a political slant, she says, like so many media outlets now have. It could represent more of a sole focus - only large-scale farms, only small-scale farms, only corporate farming, only environmental concerns... the list goes on. The Rural Voice told all of those stories, she said, in equal measure and she said she felt like she learned the most about the rural way of living from The Rural Voice.
The history and her connection with the magazine’s celebrated way of telling stories has directly influenced what she hopes to accomplish with the magazine as it continues to publish southwestern Ontario’s rural stories in the year 2025. She wants to tell the stories of this community, warts and all, and focus on all voices, not just those that have been historically celebrated in Canada’s world of agriculture.
While Boonstoppel-Pot ushered in an era of telling women’s stories more frequently in The Rural Voice - though Luymes points out that it was around the time that Boonstoppel-Pot took over, that those voices were beginning to be heard across Canadian agricultural media in a more fulsome way - Luymes hopes to continue that tradition and to feature all of the people who make up the rural Ontario landscape. That includes large- and small-scale farming alike, new Canadians who are carving out their own markets and parts of the agricultural landscape, environmentally-conscious and organic farmers, as well as traditional, large-scale farming operations that mean so much to the local economy. Basically, if it happens in rural Ontario, Luymes says she wants to write a story about it.
That includes uncomfortable topics that are crucial and on the tips of everyone’s tongues in rural Ontario, but may be unpleasant to discuss, like the rise in homelessness, human trafficking and other issues the magazine has tackled recently or hopes to cover in the future.
Two of her early priorities, however, are as traditional as they come in regards to rural life and farming in this area. First, she is working to connect with the local federations of agriculture, which have meant and continue to mean so much to the publication. Those relationships, she said, are paramount to the foundation of The Rural Voice, and ensuring that the members of those associations see themselves reflected in the pages of the magazine is among the most important tasks that Luymes feels is on her to-do list.
The second priority is perhaps the most obvious: the opportunity and the responsibility of shepherding the magazine through its 50th anniversary year; a milestone for any publication, any way you slice it.
She says, of course, there’s pressure with such a history to take on, but she also sees it as a celebration and that’s why she’s been taking the opportunity to look back at some of the magazine’s most memorable stories and reflect back on them all these years later. This is a feature that began with the March issue of the magazine. That piece can be read at the end of this story.
Looking back in a year like this can be just as important as looking forward, so she’s doing her best to do both.
Luymes is a busy bee these days. She’s not just spending her time with The Rural Voice, but she’s likely known to many in the world of agriculture thanks to her work over the years with organizations like the Maitland Valley Conservation Authority, the Huron Soil and Crop Improvement Association and the Ontario Professional Agri-Contractors Association, among others. In fact, it was a relationship at the Maitland Valley Conservation Authority that first connected her with Keith Roulston and The Rural Voice, beyond simply as a reader, about 15 years ago.
Phil Beard, the long-time general manager and secretary/treasurer of the Maitland Valley Conservation Authority, was working with Luymes and he encouraged her to reach out to the publication. That initial connection eventually led to some freelance assignments and being brought into the fold at the magazine, being assigned the odd piece here and there and being able to pitch stories to Roulston and then Boonstoppel-Pot after him. From there, her relationship with the magazine and its community of readers and contributors only deepened to the point that, when Boonstoppel-Pot felt the pull to other endeavours, Luymes was the clear successor and the person to usher The Rural Voice into its next 50 years of telling the stories of rural Ontario.
Speaking of that history, now seems as good a time as any to revisit it, courtesy of Scott Stephenson and his feature last year. Here, thanks to Scott, is the abridged story of The Rural Voice from last year’s Salute to Agriculture special issue of The Citizen.
While The Citizen’s annual “Salute to Agriculture” may come but once a year, its sister publication, The Rural Voice, has been doing nothing but saluting agriculture, once a month, for almost 50 years. The magazine’s founder, Keith Roulston, may have retired from his position as editor of the farm-focused periodical over a decade ago, but he can still be convinced to stop by the offices of North Huron Publishing to share a little bit of history about how Huron County’s record of all things rural came to be.
As with so many successful creative endeavours, The Rural Voice began when Roulston realized he could do better than the farming periodicals that were already on the newsstand. “In those days, Western Ontario Farmer Today was a big farm paper, and they were just making a small fortune, and I didn’t think they were doing the job they should be. They were mostly just running press releases, and so on and so forth. We needed a different farm paper, one that was doing more serious work about farmers, so I started The Rural Voice.” It was a natural move for a young rural journalist with a passion for agriculture. “I grew up on a farm - my life was about farming, and it’s the basis of our community here,” he said.
When he started The Rural Voice, Roulston was already well-versed in the newspaper game, so the early issues were printed in the standard newspaper style of the day. “We were doing much shorter articles at first,” he explained. At that time, the Huron County Federation of Agriculture was sending out its own newsletter via mail. “They were getting funding from the Ontario Federation of Agriculture. So we said we’ll publish your newsletter, and put it in The Rural Voice. In the beginning, it was a challenge - there hadn’t been a farm newsletter in our area before. Most of the newspapers just covered whatever stories came to them.” That first newsletter was soon joined by the Perth County Federation of Agriculture’s newsletter. Then Bruce County’s, and finally Grey’s. As those basic newsletter articles gradually began to evolve into longer stories of agricultural interest, the publication’s format switched to magazine style.
In 1975, Roulston discovered a new passion: founding a rural theatre. Over time, he divested himself of much of his publishing empire, including The Rural Voice, which changed hands several times before it came back to Blyth for good in 1991. And it didn’t come alone. “When we bought it back again, it came with all these contributors; freelancers that it collected along the way.”
Those new contributors and Roulston’s renewed stewardship brought The Rural Voice into a new era of rural journalism. “We just wanted healthy rural communities, and to serve those communities by telling the stories that are available to us,” he said. “As we went along, we found so many interesting people [whose stories we needed to tell]. I think that because of the coverage that The Rural Voice did over the years in telling stories about people doing things like conservation tillage, and so on - I think it helped change the way people farmed. Writing about those leaders and those innovators made it possible for more people to know about them.”
In his opinion, there’s only a few rules for what makes a good Rural Voice story. “It has to be interesting, and be something that people can apply to their own lives. They can say ‘oh, gee, it’s interesting what that person is doing. Could we do some of that on our farm?’”
Roulston eventually turned stewardship of The Rural Voice over to Lisa Boonstoppel-Pot, as its new editor. And, whether she was writing about worms or featuring a local farmer, Boonstoppel-Pot clearly loved what she did with the magazine for over a decade. “I was a co-op student here when I was 16 years old,” she explained. “So I have been involved with this company for a very long time. Keith was always so generous in letting me write stories for both the paper and the magazine, since I was a farm girl. And that’s how I got started.”
Despite stepping away from the editor’s role, Roulston hasn’t quite finished with the world of rural publishing. “He’s still a very treasured and valuable columnist. When he retired, I was really worried that he was going to stop writing his column,” admitted Boonstoppel-Pot. “But he was keen to go, and every month, he absolutely delivers. It’s unbelievable.”
When compared to its inaugural issue, The Rural Voice has clearly changed since she first started. “The magazine is a lot more colourful now,” she pointed out. “Visually, that’s definitely the biggest difference. All the photography used to be in black and white. And we were developing our own photos back then; technology has made everything more colourful. And easier. There’s also been some design changes, so it looks a little different. Also, none of our original freelancers are still here, although we do still have a few left from Keith’s era.”
From a content perspective, The Rural Voice has never stopped evolving right along with the agricultural community. “I think, with the advent of social media, the focus has changed a little bit. I don’t think it’s a magazine that you go to for current news... I think we are in changing times. We see it all over the place - in agriculture, and in print media specifically, as everyone turns to social media for their information and their news. But I think it’s really important to realize that journalists like you and me are the ones who go to the farms, we sit down at the kitchen tables, we talk to the real people, and we get the real story. This is not one paragraph that tells you nothing - you get a whole picture of what’s really happening. Don’t give up on print media - it has something to say!”
One thing that hasn’t changed is the sheer volume of stories that are worth telling. “Huron County is a noted agricultural county. We are top of the heap in terms of our production and farm numbers, along with the other counties we cover. Our identity is rural and agricultural. Our roots are just steeped in it, and we need to honour and celebrate that, and tell those stories, and teach and encourage one another with the stories we record in The Rural Voice.”
Boonstoppel-Pot also thinks that The Rural Voice is a worthwhile read for all people, not just those in the agricultural sector. “Even for people that are not actively farming, it’s about understanding how farming has changed. The Rural Voice has been recording those changes now for 50 years, and as people get more and more removed from the actual farm, it plays a huge role in showing and telling them what farming is like nowadays.”
Boonstoppel-Pot’s favourite type of Rural Voice stories are the ones that shine a light on local lives. “In every issue, I like to have at least one story, or more than one story, that’s simply about a farmer. A story about a farmer that’s doing something new, who wants to share what they’re doing, to talk about the why, what, where in a way that celebrates agriculture, and encourages other people to perhaps investigate what they’re doing on their farms, or perhaps even a new farmer might say ‘hey, I’d like to try that too!’ I think people’s stories are the best stories. You can learn so much as people share their accomplishments, and their difficulties, and their struggles.”