Their Wooddale farm began with strawberry production and soon expanded to include traditional crops for the wholesale market. Discovering his own passion for production, Dick and his family started a small farm in 1987. Working much of his career in extension services, Dick had a wide-ranging impact on producers, providing training and offering advice that would benefit their productivity and profitability. Upon graduation in 1978, he immediately went to work with Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial agriculture department, where he spent a 33 year career. After two years at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, he enrolled in the Diploma in Agriculture program at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College. His career with the province and on his own farm is an outstanding example of dedication and collaboration.ĭick was born in 1956 in Gander, NL.

The peace and stability of his kingdom, coupled with the economic boom brought by burgeoning population during an era of benign climate conditions, secured him a reputation as a saintly visionary who achieved the cultural and political transformation of Scotland.Richard (Dick) Oram’s innovative spirit and commitment to his fellow producers will leave a lasting impact on agriculture in Newfoundland and Labrador. He pursued his wife Matilda's lost inheritance in Northumbria, gaining control over much of northern England and giving him access to economic resources that allowed him to invest in patronage of the reformed monastic orders, and in the reconfiguration of the secular Church in Scotland.

Drawing on the experiences and connections of his youth spent at the court of his brother-in-law, Henry I of England, and moulded by the dominant personality and intense piety of his mother, St Margaret, he set out to transform his inheritance and create a powerful and dynamic kingship.Īfter neutralising all challengers to his position and building a new powerbase that drew on support from both Scotland's native nobles and the English and French knights whom he settled in his realm, David emerged as a power-broker in mid twelfth-century Britain as England descended into civil war. David I was never expected to become king, but on succeeding to the Scottish throne in 1124 he quickly demonstrated that he had the skills, ruthlessness and ambition to become one of the kingdom's greatest rulers.

David I by Richard Oram