Opinion & Farming Articles - Manitoba Co-operator

“Every time it rains, God cries”

March 14, 2012

Since January, Canadian Foodgrains Bank resource co-ordinator Harold Penner and his wife Marianne have been at a Growing Nations project at Maphutseng, Lesotho, in southern Africa. Before leaving for Ethiopia, Harold sent photos of what should be a welcome event for farmers — the arrival of rain. His comments follow. In the last few days

News, Opinion, Our History

Our history: February 1929

March 14, 2012

Hemp is not a new crop in Manitoba. The February, 1929 issue of The Scoop Shovel, which later became the Manitoba Co-operator, featured an advertisement for rope made from Manitoba-grown hemp by the Manitoba Cordage Co. in Portage. Another local product advertised was Kirchner’s seeder plow, which “plows, sows and covers the seed,” with claimed

News, Opinion

Happy hogs and right smart marketing

By Alan Guebert March 14, 2012

For over 20 years Jackie served as the main field hand on the big dairy farm of my youth. He possessed a hired man’s respect for talk; he talked only when talked to and then, most times, in a collection of southern Illinois’ phrases that carried more code than context. For example, once my father

Hogs, Livestock, News, Opinion

Economics versus culture

By Laura Rance-Unger March 14, 2012

Dermot Hayes, a respected livestock economist from Iowa State University, is admittedly flummoxed over the question of whether it will be grain producers or the livestock sector benefiting from the growing demand for protein in emerging economies. Hayes was in town last week delivering the annual Kraft Lecture, a memorial to the late University of

Opinion

India’s rising wealth and food security not reflected in its children

By Annie Banerji March 5, 2012

Crying as she is put on an electronic scale, two-year-old Rajini’s naked, shrivelled frame casts a dark shadow over a rising India, where millions of children have little to eat. The children are scrawny, listless and sick in this rundown nutrition clinic in central India with its intermittent power supply. If they survive they will

News, Opinion

OUR HISTORY: Willow Plain School

By Edward M. Ledohowski March 5, 2012

Willow Plain School is located along a short stretch of rural highway that forms the main street in the village of Sarto, an early Ukrainian settlement in the RM of Hanover in southeastern Manitoba. Constructed in 1911, it is a good, typical example of the many one-room multigrade schools that served small communities and rural

Hogs, Livestock, News, Opinion

The economics of animal welfare

By Laura Rance-Unger March 5, 2012

Back in the early 1990s, when University of Manitoba animal scientist Laurie Connor first oversaw local research into hoop-housing systems for hogs, animal welfare wasn’t really even on the public radar. The key questions of the day were whether keeping pigs outdoors through a Prairie winter compromised production efficiency. Connor told a seminar last week

Cereals, News, Opinion

It’s today’s price, not the future price

February 15, 2012

Stirling Moss, a famous racing driver of the 1950s, once said that the male of the human species will admit to not being good at just about anything except being a good driver or a good lover. If we are talking about some of the grain farmer subspecies, we might add a third skill, that

Cereals, Hogs, Livestock, News, Opinion

Letters — for Feb. 2, 2012

February 15, 2012

Are court cases really baseless Mr. Ritz? It was really quite funny to watch the minister of agriculture strut around in front of his flock at the recent Western Canadian Wheat Growers conference. He used his bully pulpit to call the recent court cases, against his government implementing legislation dismantling of the Canadian Wheat Board’s

Cereals, News, Oilseeds, Opinion

Magic-bullet solutions only last so long

By Les Mcewan February 15, 2012

We’ve all done it. Pushed our crop rotations, that is. You know that field had canola on it two years ago, but the seed you have already purchased, the fertilizer you applied last fall, or the delivery contract you already signed all make us do things that we know are not in our best agronomic

Daily Network News

Striking JBS workers to return to Colorado plant on promise of talks

Canadian finance minister talks supply chain integrity, pork tariffs with Chinese vice premier

New strategies needed for Canadian agriculture to stand out in global trade