A Boost For Wheat Research

It’s nice to see headlines about the need for more investment into wheat research these days, even if some of the stories swirling around that topic are a mite confused. Last week started with news reports in mainstream dailies across Canada citing a leaked memo from the National Research Council and reporting that genetically modified

Let’s Keep Risks In Perspective

The nuclear crisis in Japan is likely to have a big impact on the future development of the nuclear industry around the world. In a less direct way, it could also lead to more starving people. The link between the two issues is trust. Nuclear power generation is safe, we’ve been told. Unfortunately, no one


Silent Hog Barn Marks End Of An Era

It’s not like I have never been in a hog barn before, and yet this time as I enter the door, it’s very different. Gone are the familiar squeals of someone waiting to be fed. It’s silent. Deathly silent as a matter of fact. I can hear the melting snow dripping off the eaves and

Letters – for Apr. 14, 2011

Open letter to Brian Otto, president of Western Barley Growers Association: I dissected the results of the CWB elections and found a very different result and meaning than the outcome your ads proclaim. Upon looking at who originally voted in the first round and then calculating where they went on the second ballot, it became


Revenue From Wetlands

When the health of Lake Erie began to deteriorate in the 1960s, the world noticed. Its problems were visible to millions of people in two countries who live around or near that lake, and it wasn’t hard to find public support for measures to restore it to health. It’s been different for Lake Winnipeg. While

Don’t Overlook Feed Value Of DDGs

Ethanol producers often get much of the blame for driving the price of corn to its current multi-year high levels due to that industry’s strong usage of corn to make fuel. But critics overlook the growing production and distribution of Dried Distillers Grains (DDGs), a byproduct of ethanol output used in animal feeds as an


Do North American Farmers Really Feed The World?

We recently ran across a belt buckle from the 1980s that read, “The American Farmer feeds the world.” For many producers, that statement underlies much of what they do from their on-farm decision-making to the policies they support. As the 1996 Farm Bill was being debated, we remember talking to farmers who wanted to “get

Letters – for Apr. 7, 2011

By the two front-page articles in the March 24 issue it seems that our friend Mr. Ritz has achieved some kind of peace, tranquillity or you might even say the light of religion as he agrees to pull back from the wheat board debate. He also has agreed that legislation is required to give all


The Food Versus Fuel Debate Continued

With all the strange and highly unpredictable events in the global economy, the tension between economics and politics in the U.S. is making things even more interesting. Consider this: a highly indebted U.S. government pays ethanol producers 45 cents for each gallon they produce, while at the same time imposing a 54-cent tariff on imports.

Home And Market Garden Losses From Blight Can’t Be Ignored

Most commercial potato farmers sprayed their way through last season and ended up with a normal- enough-looking crop. But 2010 was a heartbreaking year for home gardeners, as a nasty blight worked its way across Manitoba decimating all but the most remote or chemically treated tomatoes. First word of the blight appeared in a June