Guest Editorial: Food from space

The Canada-wide Rogers outage last month was a reminder for me of what life was like before the internet. Although it was a huge inconvenience (I wasn’t able to work at all that day), it was a trip down memory lane. It was nice to disconnect and not feel the need to check my email

Editor’s Take: A medical mystery

Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I was a teenager in rural Saskatchewan, my small hometown of 1,100 people had its own hospital. Built during the booming 1970s, it replaced a 50-year-old structure the community had long outgrown. It had the usual services, including emergency medical treatment when needed. But these days, that building


Editorial: Needless concern

Farmers came away from the recent federal, provincial and territorial (FTP) ministers meeting in Saskatoon with a few items stroked off their wish list. Farm organizations welcomed a $500-million, or 25 per cent, increase in cost-shared funding over five years, half of which will help farmers fight climate change and reduce emissions. The ministers also

Editor’s Take: There’s money on the table. Use it

Earlier this summer, serious funds to help farmers lower fertilizer emission levels landed in Manitoba. The Prairie Watersheds Climate Program, administered by the Manitoba Association of Watersheds, is part of the federal government’s On-Farm Climate Action Fund, which promises to spend $200 million over three years. The program will fund a dozen programs aimed at


bank of canada

Editor’s Take: Going up

The Bank of Canada removed any lingering doubts last week about its commitment to fighting inflation. It delivered a jumbo rate hike of 100 basis points — or a full per cent — while facing an annualized inflation rate of more than seven per cent, according to the most recent figures from Statistics Canada. South

Editor’s Take: A return to normalcy

What a long, strange trip it’s been, to quote the old song. Back in March 2020, most of us were probably expecting a brief interruption — a few weeks at most — to our lives. Needless to say, that’s not how it played out. It’s been more than two years of cancellations, delays and shelved



Editor’s Take: Harsh lessons

I had an unexpected front-row seat to the unforgiving nature of… well, nature… this week. I was sitting in my backyard enjoying the cool of the evening and waiting for the sun to set when a songbird flew over my head. No sooner had its presence been registered by my eye, than a brownish-grey streak


Editor’s Take: Planning for the unplannable

How do you plan for — and manage — the kind of weather risk Manitoba farmers have suffered through lately? First it was years of prolonged drought, including last year’s acute blast. That crippled crop production, all but halted forage growth and raised the serious risk of some rural communities running out of drinking water.

Editor’s Take: End of an era

A very strange thing happened this week, as we put this edition of the Co-operator together. You can see it yourself, on our featured article at Farmit Manitoba. It’s the very last story that Allan Dawson will publish in these pages as a staff reporter. I say strange because most of us can’t quite imagine