Stories from our other publications
Harvest will take top billing in farmers’ minds as we put in the long hours that lie ahead of us, but other issues must be considered. Two of the most important are Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s (AAFC) attack on farmers’ right to freely use our own seed, and AAFC’s seemingly unsupervised rewriting of the Canada […] Read more
How much real interest is there in fake meat? By that I mean not the sort of interest you see in the equity markets where share prices have been driven through the roof because some investor doesn’t want to miss the next Microsoft or Amazon. Or the latest media hype, of which there’s been no […] Read more
Critics say this effort has gone awry and is now firmly in the realm of ‘absence claim abuse’
Most consumers have seen the Non-GMO logos on bread and many other food products while shopping at the grocery store. Today in North America, the Non-GMO Project Verified logo is on over 50,000 food products that bring in more than US$30 billion in retail sales. The green leaves and the orange butterfly are literally everywhere […] Read more
Keeping kids safe on the farm is a complex balance
It’s a story that’s sending a collective shudder through the farming community — and a powerful message. A four-year-old boy died of head injuries last year after he fell out of the skid-steer bucket he was riding in with his brother while their father was using it to move wood chips on their Ontario farm. […] Read more
The past couple of months have been frustrating ones for the staff of this publication. For us in the agriculture sector the election was particularly ill-timed as it encompassed much of a particularly challenging growing season. We’ve run into more than a few examples of gun-shy provincial civil servants, who have been extremely reluctant to […] Read more
Forty-seven years. Under a plan put forward by the Progressive Conservatives in the waning days of the provincial election, that’s how long it will have taken farmers to get a fairer education tax system. It was a foundational issue in 1984 when the province’s general farm organization, the Keystone Agricultural Producers, came into being. To […] Read more
It seems the parties have decided everything outside the Perimeter Highway isn’t worth talking about
In the 24-7 news cycle we live in, it’s hard for us all to take the time and consider what might be coming down the road. We seemingly lack the ability to see past today or tomorrow because we are so inundated with information that we simply can’t begin to consider what lies ahead. That’s […] Read more
The dawn of the new U.S. marketing year comes with burdensome supplies and absent buyers
As the 2019-20 U.S. corn- and soybean-marketing years begin, the amount of product sold for export through mid-month is dismal, dampening the chances of trimming domestic supplies over the next year. Through Aug. 15, some 9.94 million tonnes of corn and soybeans have been sold to foreign buyers for shipment in 2019-20, down 55 per […] Read more
Trade wars are proving more complex than the tweeter-in-chief expected
Most farmers are old enough to remember when the U.S. president noted that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” That was, after all, several tariff hikes, dozens of trade meetings, and more than 15,000 presidential tweets ago. It may seem like a lifetime but it was just 19 months ago, on March 2, […] Read more
A recent call from the Canadian Federation of Agriculture for more support for farmers affected by trade issues raises some interesting questions. The CFA was responding to the announcement of $1.7 billion in direct payments to dairy producers over eight years, compensation for opening a portion of the dairy market to international competition under a […] Read more
