Jon Lien

125th Anniversary of the Confederation of Canada Commemorative Medal

The farm was one of the first in Newfoundland to achieve organic certification status. In 2011, Jon (posthumously) and Judy were presented with the Gerritt Loo Award honouring outstanding contribution to the organic farming community.

Lien’s health gradually declined after a truck accident in 2002, and he was hospitalized in 2007, requiring full time nursing care. He died of heart complications on 14 April 2010.

In the late 1970s, Lien received a call about a group of whales trapped in ice in Halls Bay, Newfoundland. He travelled there and set up a tent on his zodiac and stayed there studying the whales until the coast guard broke enough ice for the whales to swim clear.

Jon and Judy moved to Newfoundland in 1968, where Jon accepted a position at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He and Judy bought a six-acre lot of land in Portugal Cove St. Philips and hand-built their house with recycled wood from an old warehouse in downtown St. Johns and the office of the inoperative Bell Island mine. It is here that they also started their organic farm.

In 1962, Jon married Judy after graduating from St. Olaf, and they moved to Pullman, Washington where he initially pursued a doctorate in clinical psychology at Washington State University. However, the study of animal behaviour captured his interest and he reoriented his studies to complete his doctorate with a specialization in animal behaviour.

Lien moved to Northfield, Minnesota in 1957 to pursue arts and literature at St. Olaf College. During his time at St. Olaf, he worked for the Wilderness Canoe Base. He also met his future wife Judy Traastad.

Ordin Jon Lien CM ONL (19 March 1939 - 14 April 2010), nicknamed “the Whale Man”, was a Canadian conservationist, researcher, professor, and organic farmer who founded Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Whale Research Group. From the late 1970s to the early 2000s, Lien released whales and other cetaceans entrapped in fishing nets along the coast of Newfoundland, and innovated now-widely-used whale rescue techniques. He invented The Lien Pinger, an acoustic alarm which is attached to fishing nets to reduce whale entrapments.

Jon Lien was born in Clark, South Dakota on 19 March 1939. His parents were Ordin and Alvera Lien. He was around animals from a young age between fishing, working on his uncle’s farm, and raising chickens in his parents’ garage.