Rural Routes Podcast was a podcasts series on rural issues I published while working at the Leslie Harris Centre of Regional Policy and Development at Memorial University of Newfoundland. It asked “What is rural in the 21st century?” The podcast was born out of a conversation with my friend Dr. Ryan Gibson after a Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation conference gathering on PEI. Rebecca Cohoe from Memorial’s Office of Public Engagement who grew up on a rural route named the show and later joined as a co-host and a producer. With the closure of the centre, the university stopped paying the hosting fees and the episodes disappeared from the podcast feed. I was able to salvage all of the episodes with the help of Barry Rooke from the National Community and Campus Radio Association and they are published here as an archive.
A Canadian farmer is on average 55 years old. Not these farmers. Rural Routes hosts Rebecca Cohoe and Bojan Fürst bring you the stories of four young women who run farms in Prince Edward Island, Southwestern Ontario, and near Bologna, Italy. Mary-Ellen Godfrey, Lisa Paganelli, Lindsay Menich, and Katrina McQuail share their experiences of going back to the farm and finding ways to operate their farm businesses in their own way.