Grain Industry Worried By New Toxin Limits

Canada’s grain industry wants safer food, but it doubts pending regulations to restrict exposure to ochratoxin A (OTA), a suspected carcinogen in grains and other foods, will be effective. In the meantime, those regulations threaten to add costs throughout the pipeline from farmer to food processor. “There really needs to be a supply chain solution,”

Be Prepared For A Home Invasion

The first step to dealing with an infestation is to identify the intruder. Termites are 10 times as destructive as carpenter ants, but termites are far less likely to be the culprits as they are not native to the Prairies. The distinctions in appearance between carpenter and other species of ant are subtle, and ants


Battling World Hunger By Increasing Global Production?

U. S. farmers began to believe that they had a responsibility to increase production and exports so that the hungry of the world could be fed. For some time now, we have focused our attention on the twin issues of production and exports of major crops as a way of examining the export-oriented policies that

Viterra Plans Canola Plant In China

Canadian grain handler Viterra Inc. confirmed plans April 20 to build a canola-crushing plant in South China with state-owned company Guangxi Beibu Gulf International Port Group Co. The plant will be located at the Port of Fangchenggang in the province of Guangxi and will crush about 680,000 tonnes annually, Viterra said. The move comes as



In Brief… – for Apr. 22, 2010

Get real: A new report released by Canadian undergraduate student leaders urges the food systems sector to institute “real cost” pricing for food. “We want to see food prices more accurately reflect their full economic, environmental, and social costs,” said Environmental Life Sciences graduate student Alison McDonald of Trent University. “This would result in carbon


Streamline Meal Preparation For Busy Spring

Spring gets busy. As well as the usual busyness on the farm, after a long winter with often unknown weather conditions, the arrival of warmer weather brings more meetings, conferences, concerts, graduations and all sorts of activities prior to summer. Busy schedules can lead to erratic mealtimes. Erratic mealtimes, in turn, can lead to people

Soil Quality Is On The Public Radar

“National Soil Conservation Week allows us to celebrate this success and keep soils in the public eye.” – GLEN SHAW Farm soils are moving up the radar of public interest. Long the forgotten child of the environmental movement, there is growing evidence that soils are becoming of greater interest to the general public and the


Are U. S. Regulators Dropping The Ball On Biocrops?

“Science is not being considered in policy setting and deregulation. This research is important. We need to be vigilant.” – ROBERT KREMER Robert Kremer, a U. S. government microbiologist who studies Midwestern farm soil, has spent two decades analyzing the rich dirt that yields billions of bushels of food each year and helps the United

Brazil Farmers Shown How To Profit By Conserving

Talk of ecological diversity or saving rare species does not fly very far in Mato Grosso. The state is Brazil’s top soy producer, churning out an annual harvest of about 18 million tonnes. Fields of emerald green line the highways, stretching out to horizons so flat they look drawn with a ruler. The crops have