Doggerel — 30th anniversary edition

The holiday is over, with all its big meals epicurious You know what that means: it’s time to get serious And start the new year with a bit of reflection On how the past year went in an agricultural direction Then look ahead to advise which crops to be seeding And give you one or

Editorial: The meat industry has a lot on its plate

Predictably, the Canadian Meat Council doesn’t take kindly to the suggestion that consumers are showing increased interest in plant-based proteins at the expense of meat. The council came out swinging at the Canadian Food Price Report released earlier this month, calling the report misleading and noting that demand for meat is “only” set to fall


Editorial: The slow road to rural Internet growth

The other day I had the opportunity to sit down with some of the equipment manufacturers developing the latest precision agriculture technology. The discussion was both interesting and informative and hinted at some tantalizing developments as this system really begins to get going. But it also revealed just how dependent the whole thing is going

Editorial: Staying safe on the farm

Agriculture regularly tops surveys and studies of dangerous professions. Despite the process of going high tech, every season there’s still a heaping helping of manual labour, heavy equipment, confined spaces and moving parts. Add the exhaustion of long hours and mental stress and it can be a recipe for disaster. This all added up to


Thanks to public breeding, Western Canadian wheat yield gains due to improved seed varieties increased 0.7 per cent per year between 1991 and 2012.

Editorial: Getting it right

It’s early in the winter farm meeting season but already seed royalties are promising to be one of the year’s evergreen topics. That’s hardly surprising, after all, seed is a fundamental building block for any grain farm. It’s also something that’s seen a lot of changes over the past few decades. Most of the crops

Editorial: Hung out to dry

It’s a tall order trying to obey rules when you don’t know what they are, but that’s exactly the situation some Manitoba farmers are facing as they try to preserve this year’s weather-damaged crop. The German novelist Franz Kafka captured this nicely in his 1925 novel The Trial, where the protagonist, one Josef K. is


Editorial: Volatility likely to linger

When you are as dependent on exports as Canadian farmers, the ability to weather volatile markets has to be part of the business plan. The Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance says Canada exports half of the beef and cattle produced, 70 per cent of its soybeans, 70 per cent of its pork production, 75 per cent

A university research team estimates that feeding the global population in 2050 will require 12 million more hectares of arable land and one billion more hectares of pasture land if current food choices are maintained.

Editorial: Feeding the world — but with what?

It’s commonly believed that the world is at risk of running out of food and enough land to produce it. It’s true that the world’s population continues to grow and an emerging middle class in developing economies is increasing the demand for a higher-quality diet. It’s also true that the number of hungry people on


Editorial: Stuck in the middle

Manitoba farmers are caught in the middle of a nasty spat between Ottawa and Broadway. The province recently scrapped its carbon tax proposal after learning Ottawa would be imposing its own. That concerned local farm groups as the provincial proposal had some hard-fought recognition for the precarious position of the province’s farm business community. Most

Editorial: Changing times on the farm

I had the opportunity over Thanksgiving this year to reacquaint myself with driving a Peterbilt when the weather lined up to actually allow a few days of combining. Actually, there were three Peterbilts, as my brother seems to be working with a collection. There’s the best of the three, a nondescript brown unit that quietly