What do you say to a farmer with 80 per cent of the crop in the field and snow on the ground? That’s not a rhetorical question, nor some elaborate setup for a punchline, though it may feel like a bad joke this fall. It’s the reality for a lot of producers this year. The
Editorial: Reaching out during a tough harvest
Editorial: Seeking allies
The rubber has hit the road in U.S.-Canada trade negotiations and the news isn’t good for Canadian dairy producers. It appears they’re set to lose as much as 3.5 per cent of their market to tariff-free U.S. dairy imports. That’s on top of similar concessions made during negotiations for the Canada-European trade deal that saw
Editorial: Self-reflection
As the debate over the fate of the Canadian Wheat Board was coming to a head a few years back, one of the key points repeatedly raised was how Canada’s quality assurance system gave it a leg up. Having a centralized sales desk meant there was an entity with a rational reason for maintaining and
Editorial: Mission improbable
It’s that time of year when all the hoping and wishing — or fear and loathing, depending on the year — gets put to the test. In a lot of grain-growing regions around the world this summer, our own included, most farmers probably weren’t predicting a bountiful harvest. From Europe to the U.S., Australia to
Editorial: Gone Hollywood
One of the great issues of the modern hyper-wired information age is the perniciousness of false facts. It seems to be all but impossible to stamp out an untruth, once it’s been released into the wild. No matter how many actual facts one presents, there’s still going to be a cohort of people somewhere who
Editorial: A new view on Canada/U.S. trade
If you’ve been too busy on the combine to keep up with the latest developments or, like many, have simply become numb to the rhetoric and brinksmanship after nearly two years of threats and bluster, there’s been a big and not-so-good development on the trade front this week. It turns out those side negotiations between
Editorial: A big boom
It’s been quite the week in Ottawa. Even in the midst of harvest it was impossible to ignore the very public departure of former leadership front-runner Maxime Bernier from the Conservative Party of Canada’s benches. He didn’t just burn the bridges as he left, he took the time to dynamite the piers as he went,
Editorial: Fair fees
There’s an acronym long popular with right-of-centre thinkers from the late economist Milton Friedman to the science fiction author Robert Heinlein: TANSTAAFL. It’s an abbreviation of the concept, ‘there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,’ and has been used to convey the impossibility of getting something for nothing. One wonders if that’s what
Editorial: Beggar-thy-neighbour
To steal a line from “Star Wars” filmmaker George Lucas, on the night of Nov. 8, 2016, I felt a ‘great disturbance in the force.’ The occasion, of course, was the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, and the subsequent horror of many. At the time I was more sanguine. He may arguably be
Silage is a growing trend for beef cattle operations
Weather woes and labour shortages are all adding up to a new case for parking the baler
As beef cattle herds get larger, the case grows stronger for silage instead of bales. Dwayne Summach, livestock and feed extension specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture told a session at last week’s Ag in Motion outdoor farm show here that larger operations can better absorb the higher overhead costs, and benefit the most from parking the
Cyber-Savvy Farmer
