a worker pushes a cart loaded with crates in a community food bank warehouse

Upgrades on menu for food bank operator Harvest Manitoba

Farm Credit Canada donates $500,000 to Harvest Manitoba for warehousing updates and expansion

Upgrades to food bank operator Harvest Manitoba’s warehouse operations, receiving cash from Farm Credit Canada, are expected to help speed up delivery and reduce waste across the province’s agri-food supply chain.




A container of honey proudly displays its Canadian farm origins. Trade tensions, with the U.S. threatening tariffs on Canadian products, has revived calls for Canadians to buy local and buy Canadian at the grocery store.

How to buy Canadian at the grocery store

“Buy local” and “buy Canadian” campaigns are spreading, thanks in no small part to friction with the U.S. around tariffs and a desire for grocery shoppers to support Canadian businesses

Fill your grocery cart with more Canadian-made and Canadian-grown food items. Here’s how to tell how Canadian some of those products actually are.



Scenic autumn view of the rural landscape, orchards, vineyards, and wineries of Oliver located in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, Canada. Photo: laughingmango/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Local food system would reap big economic benefits researcher says

B.C. researchers found that the Okanagan could produce two thirds of its own food while maintaining exports

Assuming an average Canadian diet, the Okanagan can currently produce 88 per cent of its dairy needs, Mullinix and colleagues wrote in a report on the study. It can produce 60 per cent of its poultry needs, 34 per cent of its fruit needs (due to fruits eaten that can’t be grown in the region, or are eaten out of season), and small amounts of other food groups like grains, red meat, eggs and oils.


The meat section in a grocery store in Selkirk, Man., on Jan. 30, 2022.

The resiliency of ‘local’

North America’s meatpackers are not having a good time. As our reporter Don Norman wrote in last week’s front-page story, there’s been a torrent of bad news from some of the biggest names in the business. In early May, Reuters reported that U.S.-based Tyson Foods, the world’s second-largest producer of beef, pork and chicken, had

Attendees of the Discover the Farm event crushing canola to create oil.

Farm and Food Awareness week events raise profile of Manitoba agriculture sector

Discover the Farm beat attendance expectations and AITC-Manitoba officially launched its new virtual knowledge hub

Visitors to the unofficial kickoff party for Food and Farm Awareness Week were greeted with warm skies and above-seasonal temperatures Sept. 18. The Discover the Farm event at the Bruce D. Campbell Farm and Food Discovery Centre took place one day before the week’s official launch and it lived up to its name. “It was a phenomenal day,


Interest in local food grew after the onset of the pandemic in 2020, says the executive director of Direct Farm Manitoba.

Direct farm marketing makes gains in Manitoba

The pandemic shifted farmer and consumer habits, but may make data less representative of the norm, says Direct Farm Manitoba

The number of Manitoba farms that direct-market products grew by 12 per cent between 2016 and 2020, a new report indicates. The report, released this summer, used sources including the 2021 federal census of agriculture. It shows that in 2020, just over 1,000 farms were directly selling food to customers, up from 900 in 2016.

apples

Early-pandemic calls to localize supply chains unfounded

With a year's worth of data, three agriculture economists revisit early-pandemic predictions on the food supply chain

With a year's worth of data, three agriculture economists revisit early-pandemic predictions on the food supply chain

A year of data shows early-pandemic calls for radical changes to food systems and risk management programs were unfounded, say some economists. Particularly in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, food supply chains struggled to adapt to changing consumption patterns and processors shut down due to virus outbreaks. “Into that void of uncertainty came