One of the hardest jobs for a newspaper editor is deciding each week’s front-page lineup. Generally speaking, the stories chosen should carry some special significance that makes them newsworthy; they need to be unique, unusual, or just plain interesting. That’s how a rather mundane story about dairy farming wound up on the front page of
Finding A Better Farm Story
PFRA Name Retired After 74 Years
The PFRA, an agency with an acronym synonymous with soil conservation on the Prairies, has quietly been dissolved into a new branch of the federal government. The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration is now part of the Agri-Environment Services Branch within Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, department officials confirmed last week. Jamshed Merchant, the assistant deputy minister
More Than A Name
Over much of Saskatchewan it was common for farmers en route to town to become trapped in soil drifts across the roads in summer as by snowdrifts in winter. – MEN AGAINST THE DESERT, JAMES H. GRAY 1967 Few of us can imagine much less remember the conditions that brought the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration
Conservation Tillage Story A Template For Innovation
“You have technological things on top of economics on top of policy on top of psychological factors and this is what creates innovation.” – MURRAY FULTON When Prairie farmers think of conservation tillage, they think of things like economics, weed control and crop rotations. When academics like the University of Saskatchewan’s Murray Fulton think of
Summerfallow Was An Accident Of History
Historians have dutifully chronicled the 1885 Battle of Batoche in Saskatchewan for its role quashing the Métis uprising led by Louis Riel. But less well known is how it caused the newly arrived agrarian settlers to take a wrong turn in soil management – one that would prove devastating to future generations and take more
Innovation Capacity
You could say mad scientists and farmers operating on the lunatic fringe brought about one of the greatest innovations of 20th century agriculture. Some might go so far as to suggest it has saved Prairie farming – from plowing itself into a dusty oblivion. Zero tillage or no-till farming, as it has come to be
What’s The Alternative?
“Never forget this – it’s a pennies business,” Keystone Processors president Kelly Penner said last week following the new beef-packing company’s official opening in the former Schneider’s pork plant on Marion St. in Winnipeg. It’s also a business in which new players need to watch their backs. As one industry participant put it recently, the
The Time Has Come
It was bound to happen sooner or later, but the Manitoba government may have poked a hornet’s nest with its proposal to make membership in a general farm policy group mandatory. If the current proposal comes to pass, farmers would register their operations and be required to directly support a general farm operation sanctioned by
Kraft Lecture Timely
“He would have been impressed with the quality of the presentation and the quality of the questions.” – brian oleson University of Manitoba students too young to have learned from the late Daryl Kraft as a professor nevertheless felt his influence last week at the inaugural lecture series established in his memory. “This is something
Finding Common Ground
Farm organizations and rural advocacy groups haven’t exactly been tripping over themselves to sign on to the Manitoba Food Charter. In fact, the Manitoba Women’s Institute – once a fearless advocate for similar values – voted almost unanimously a couple of years back against a resolution to support it. Likewise, mainstream farmers have been noticeably