Editorial: Back to normal

A farmer who’s been around the block can’t be blamed for watching the current economic and political situation with growing nervousness. Anyone who was associated with a Prairie farm during the 1980s and ’90s has no choice but to remember those painful lost years, especially in the crops sector. Income dried up, losses mounted and

Editorial: Wild things roaming

A few years back, an acquaintance returned to school at mid-career and studied natural resource management. He was lucky enough to land a job with the province that first summer, checking boats at a stop on the Trans-Canada Highway at the Manitoba-Ontario border, to prevent the spread of zebra mussels. I mentioned that this sounded


Canada - U.S. border crossing

Editorial: Winds of war

Are we staring down the barrel of another agriculture trade war? That’s the multibillion-dollar question that should be keeping the Manitoba agriculture sector up at night. After all, there are few that are more trade dependent. Manitoba is an export juggernaut. A few numbers from Statistics Canada help set the stage. In 2017 Manitoba sent

Editorial: Hands up!

As someone who just turned 50 this past winter, I have no personal memories of the Great Grain Robbery of the summer of 1972, only what I’ve heard and read. The tongue-in-cheek name references the Great Train Robbery nine years earlier, when a Royal Mail train from Glasgow to London was relieved of 2.6 million


Editorial: Playing the long game

Some canola growers are clearly getting frustrated by what they perceive as inaction on the part of the federal government. As our Allan Dawson reports from the front page of our May 9 issue, some are saying the government of the day hasn’t done enough, or indeed, even anything. Why, they wonder, hasn’t there been

Editorial: Keep calm, farm on

Every year, as seeding begins to ramp up, there’s no shortage of uncertainty. One can hope for the best, plan for the worst, and still find themselves in the weeds as an unexpected event or uncontrollable variable comes home to roost. Yet that never seems to stop the farmers of Manitoba, or even give them


Editorial: Back to the future?

Trying to predict the future with any accuracy is a fool’s errand, but that doesn’t stop plenty from trying. One of the biggest fallacies people fall into is the ‘recency effect,’ when the events of the near past are assumed to be more important than earlier events. Informally, it’s become shorthand for the assumption that

Editorial: Human nature

It’s one of those philosophical questions — can there really be too much of a good thing? In the case of glyphosate it would seem the answer might be yes, especially when it comes to crop residues. There’s little doubt why so much of the product is used here in Western Canada. It’s nothing short


Agriculture is poised for a data revolution, but what good data if you can’t access it or transmit it?

Editorial: Testing the limits of rural Internet

Anyone who’s spent time recently in voice-mail jail can confirm often it’s best to take one’s interaction with large organizations online. True, it’s probably just a cost-cutting measure and they’re pushing that cost onto you, the client. But it’s often also undeniably easier to take the self-serve option, where you do it yourself, at a

Editorial: Solution to canola dispute easier said than done

There’s been more than a little talk lately that the federal government needs to “get on a plane,” head to China and sort this canola situation out. That is an understandable sentiment with obvious appeal to human nature, which favours obvious action on pressing issues, the act of being seen to “do something.” But the