About The Prairie Post

The Prairie Post

The Prairie Post is a weekly newspaper for Canadian farmers in the southern areas of Alberta and Saskatchewan — an agricultural weekly published by the Alta Newspaper Group, with its east edition centred on Swift Current, Saskatchewan and southeast Alberta and its west edition on southern Alberta. Printed by the Medicine Hat News (east edition) and the Lethbridge Herald (west edition), the paper reports a circulation of 17,449 and publishes on Fridays under publisher Ryan McAdams and managing editor Ryan Dahlman, serving one of the most productive farming regions in the world.

Overview

The Prairie Post is a weekly agricultural newspaper covering the southern prairies — the grain, cattle, and mixed-farming country of southern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan. It is owned and published by the Alta Newspaper Group, the regional publisher whose holdings include the Medicine Hat News, the Lethbridge Herald, and the Sherbrooke Record. The paper's headquarters are in Medicine Hat, Alberta, with the Saskatchewan edition centred on Swift Current — the prairie city the Saskatchewan Weekly Newspapers Association lists as the home of the "Swift Current Prairie Post."

The paper publishes in two editions: the east edition, covering southeast Alberta and southwest Saskatchewan and printed by the Medicine Hat News, and the west edition, covering southern Alberta and printed by the Lethbridge Herald. The publisher is Ryan McAdams and the managing editor is Ryan Dahlman. The paper appears on Fridays, and its website is prairiepost.com.

With a reported circulation of 17,449, the Prairie Post is among the larger agricultural weeklies in Western Canada — a paper whose readers are the farmers and ranchers whose operations feed the country and the world.

History

The Prairie Post was created to serve the agricultural communities of the southern prairies — a region where farming is not one industry among many but the foundation of the economy and the culture. As the farm press consolidated in the late twentieth century, the Post emerged as Alta Newspaper Group's agricultural flagship: a weekly devoted entirely to the business and life of farming, distributed across the grain belt of two provinces.

The Alta Newspaper Group itself is a significant regional publisher: its dailies, the Medicine Hat News and the Lethbridge Herald, anchor southeastern Alberta's news ecosystem, and the group is majority-owned (59 percent) by Glacier Media, the Vancouver-based media company — a structure that gives the Prairie Post the backing of a national media group while keeping its editorial focus resolutely agricultural and local.

The two-edition structure — east printed in Medicine Hat, west printed in Lethbridge — reflects the geography of the readership: the farming communities of the southern prairies stretch from the Saskatchewan border to the Rocky Mountain foothills, and the paper's editions divide that vast territory into manageable coverage areas.

Content and Coverage

The Prairie Post covers agriculture as a business, a science, and a way of life. Its reporting takes in commodity markets and grain prices, cattle and livestock markets, farm equipment and agricultural technology, agronomy and crop science, weather and its consequences, farm policy and government programs, trade and transportation (the rail and port systems on which prairie farmers depend), and the business of the farm — land values, succession planning, and farm finance.

The paper covers the institutions of prairie agriculture: the producer commissions and associations, the research stations, the equipment dealers and auction marts, the grain companies and terminals. It reports on the policy debates that shape farming — from the Canadian Wheat Board era through supply management, carbon policy, and international trade agreements — with the depth that comes from writing for readers whose livelihoods turn on the outcomes.

Beyond the business of farming, the Post covers the rural communities its readers live in: the small towns of the southern prairies, their schools and rinks, their fairs and rodeos, and the people who sustain them. The agricultural calendar — seeding, spraying, harvest, calving — sets the paper's rhythm, and its Friday publication gives farmers the week's markets and news before the weekend.

Coverage and Audience

The Prairie Post serves the farmers, ranchers, and agribusiness operators of southern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan — some of the most productive agricultural land in Canada, growing wheat, canola, barley, pulses, and cattle for domestic and export markets. Its circulation of 17,449 reaches deep into that community.

The paper's readers are the decision-makers of prairie agriculture: the farm operators who manage thousands of acres, the ranchers, the equipment dealers, the agronomists, and the professionals who serve the farm economy. For them, the Post is a business publication as much as a community paper — the source for the market information, technical knowledge, and policy coverage on which farm decisions depend.

The southern prairies the Post serves are among the most productive — and most variable — farming regions in the world. Southern Alberta's irrigated districts grow potatoes, sugar beets, and specialty crops alongside the grain and cattle operations; the dryland country produces wheat, canola, barley, and pulses for export through the Vancouver and Prince Rupert terminals; and the region's feedlots and ranches make it the heart of Canada's beef industry. The Post's journalism follows all of it: the irrigation districts' water politics, the cattle market cycles, the grain transportation system, and the trade agreements that determine whether a harvest pays. Its Friday publication lands the week's markets on farmers' desks before the weekend — timing that matters when Monday's decisions turn on Friday's prices.

The two-edition structure serves two overlapping but distinct audiences: the east edition's readers in southeast Alberta and southwest Saskatchewan, and the west edition's readers in southern Alberta's irrigated and dryland farming country. Together, they cover a farming region that feeds millions.

Ownership

The Prairie Post is owned and published by the Alta Newspaper Group, the regional newspaper company whose properties include the Medicine Hat News, the Lethbridge Herald, and Quebec's Sherbrooke Record. Alta is majority-owned (59 percent) by Glacier Media, the Vancouver-based media and business-information company.

The ownership structure places the Post within a network of prairie and regional newspapers — printed by the group's own dailies in Medicine Hat and Lethbridge — giving the agricultural weekly the production and business resources of an established newspaper group while preserving its specialized editorial mission.

The Swift Current connection anchors the paper's Saskatchewan identity. Swift Current — the prairie city at the heart of the southwest Saskatchewan grain belt — is the Saskatchewan edition's centre, and the Saskatchewan Weekly Newspapers Association lists the paper as the "Swift Current Prairie Post": the Saskatchewan face of an Alberta-headquartered paper. That cross-border structure mirrors the readership itself, whose farms, markets, and concerns pay no attention to the provincial line.

Digital Presence

The Prairie Post publishes online at prairiepost.com, where the Friday print editions are extended with digital agricultural news, market updates, and archives. The website serves the paper's geographically dispersed readership — farmers across two provinces who follow markets and news online — and carries the agricultural advertising (equipment, inputs, services, auctions) that is the lifeblood of the farm press.

For the southern prairies, the Prairie Post remains the agricultural weekly: the paper that reports the markets on Friday, covers the harvest in the fall and seeding in the spring, and speaks to the farmers of Alberta and Saskatchewan in the language of the land they work.