This season Manitoba canola growers shouldn’t be asking if they should be spraying fungicides — they should be asking themselves if there’s any possible reason they shouldn’t. Clinton Jurke, director of agronomy for the Canola Council of Canada, says it’s been a moist spring, yield looks good in much of the province and dense canopies
Is there any reason not to spray?
A wet spring has canola fields full of sclerotinia pathogens as flowering begins in earnest
Editorial: Time to change
Afew years back, while working as a writer for our sister publication Country Guide, I spoke at some length with Saskatchewan-based agriculture economist Murray Fulton, about how farm policy is typically set in Canada. He told me that what tends to happen is something he called “punctuated equilibrium” — which is to say that Canadian
Editorial: A fine balance
Few would doubt the special nature of the agriculture industry. After all, it’s the only sector I can think of that rates its own census, and one of the very few which has its own federal and provincial governmental departments. There are programs such as AgriStability and provincial crop insurance and special dispensation in a
Editorial: A voice for you
One of the greatest issues you face as a farmer in the coming years is going to be ensuring you have a voice in the public realm. Increasingly, there are people who have opinions about the way you farm and that’s not going to change. You can attempt to educate them about what you do
Earls’ reversal wins battle, not war
One of Canada’s highest-profile food and agriculture commentators says the beef industry shouldn’t be celebrating victory over getting Earls to roll back its humane beef certification decision. Sylvain Charlebois, a professor of marketing studies at the University of Guelph who frequently writes about food consumers and how they interact with the agriculture and food industry,
Editorial: Stuck in time
Is it time for a fundamental rethink of Canada’s agriculture trade policy? That simple question is, these days, tantamount to heresy in the agriculture sector, long preoccupied with trade issues. However, a new policy note from the independent research group Agri-Food Economic Systems in Guelph, Ontario, suggests it might be worth asking. The research team,
Humane beef move pushes Canadian beef off Earls menu
Beef groups say the move ignores the fact that the industry-wide standards in Canada are already equivalent
A move by the Earls restaurant chain to source “Certified Humane” beef from a Kansas supplier has kicked off a furor across the country. The move amounts to nothing but a marketing strategy and ignores that industry-led standards in Canada are equivalent or better, according to Brian Lemon, Manitoba Beef Producers’ recently appointed general manager.
A wet cycle has caused some farmers to rethink zero till
Seeding & Tillage Focus: As the province’s wet cycle appears poised to break, soil compaction is a lingering after-effect
The past few years have been a bit hard on zero till in Manitoba. Faced with a flood followed by a long wet cycle, more and more farmers in the southwest part of the province were forced to do something they thought they’d left in the past — pull out their tillage implements. Their aim,
Editorial: Future non-farmers
The agriculture community spends a lot of time and energy worrying about the future of the next generation of farmers. Succession planning has become a cottage industry, governments and agencies fall over backward creating young farmer programs, and there’s constant fretting over how we might smooth their way. But the fact is most of your
Twist and turns
Returning to the Manitoba Co-operator feels a lot like coming home
You never really know where life is going to take you. About 20 years ago, I was working at a potato-processing plant in Carberry, making french fries for the U.S. market, where I’d been employed since 1993, and decided it was time to go back to school. I applied to the communications program at Red
Cyber-Savvy Farmer
