Canola award of excellence

Staff / The Manitoba Canola Growers Association has awarded honoured Dugald farmer Ken Edie the 2013 Manitoba Canola Growers Award of Excellence. Edie was the first president of the association back in 1970, when the association went by the Manitoba Rapeseed Growers Association. During his farming career, he served the Manitoba canola and agriculture industry


Paraguay soy farmers ask courts to halt Monsanto royalties

Growers want the courts to match a Brazilian ruling where a state court ordered Monsanto to stop charging

Reuters / A group of Paraguayan farmers asked the courts Feb. 5 to stop U.S. biotech company Monsanto from charging royalties for use of its genetically modified soybeans in the world’s No. 4 exporter. The farmers say royalty payments should be halted because the company charges growers about $40 million per year to use its

Kansas company markets flax-fed ground beef

A Manhattan, Kansas company has started to market omega-3-enriched ground beef from cattle fed with flax. NBO3 Technologies worked with Jim Drouillard, a Kansas State University professor of animal sciences who has been researching the addition of flax to cattle diets to increase the omega-3 fatty acid content. Omega-3s have been shown to reduce heart


Harvest losses bedevil sunflower growers

Sunflowers pose challenges during harvest as drier conditions lead to increased shatter and seed loss

Drier temperatures can help once sunflower seeds are in the bin, but are a challenge when they’re still in the fields. “It’s getting to be more of an issue every year,” Bud Pittenger told producers during the annual Special Crops Symposium in Winnipeg. “The sunflowers are drying down so much faster nowadays … there is



Soybean root rot pathogen breaks the rules

For every rule there’s an exception. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada researchers have discovered a devastating soybean pathogen has developed a means of breaking Mendel’s laws, which sets out the rules on how genetic characteristics are passed on via inheritance. The discovery could lead to better control of soybean root rot disease, a major problem worldwide,

Agriculture Canada sees biggest wheat area in 10 years

Canadian farmers will plant the biggest wheat area in 10 years in 2013 and slightly less canola, the federal Agriculture Department said in its first planting forecast of the year. Attractive prices and a modest shift away from canola and other crops should entice farmers into planting more wheat, according to the forecast for the