Editorial: Prairie solitudes

What is our country’s relationship with its indigenous citizens going to be in the coming years? This is an important question and probably more important to you than many. First Nations communities are predominantly rural and frequently are your neighbours. But as a good friend of mine pointed out a while back, while following the

Editorial: Safety first

A few years ago I had what I now ruefully refer to as a series of unfortunate events. It began innocently enough with a phone call one Saturday morning from a friend, wondering if I could help him move a couch. An hour or so later, on a frosty March morning, we were wrestling it


Editorial: Peace and prosperity

Maybe it’s time for agriculture to climb down from its wartime footing. For decades now it’s been a battle as farmers fight nature, red in tooth and claw, to prevent crop damages and loss. It’s hardly surprising when you consider the historical context out of which our modern Green Revolution agriculture sprang. It took off

Editorial: Consumer divorce

Talking to farmers these days about their relationship with consumers is like talking to a jilted lover. They can’t understand what’s just happened. In their minds, things were going so well. They’ve done what consumers asked, provided cheap and safe food, produced with the most modern technology. Everything was going along swimmingly, farmers thought. True,


Clubroot figured out canola in Alberta. Then it began destroying canola.

Editorial: Long-term plans essential

The farms that are winners tomorrow will be run by farmers who are proactively understanding and defusing production problems today. There are a number of growing issues that could be a disaster tomorrow, but growers can prevent them if they’re committed to doing the right thing now. The best example, and the one that’s a

Editorial: The nothing strategy

This week, President Obama is expected to sign legislation that will require labels on foods produced using ingredients from genetically modified crops — a notion many in food and farming circles once considered unthinkable. That is, until they were confronted with the potential for something much worse — multiple labelling laws. In the absence of


Editorial: Time for a time-out

What are your vacation plans this year? I ask because I suspect the answer for many of you will be that you don’t really have any plans, or more likely, you feel too busy to take a break. It’s understandable. After all, summer is the busiest season on any farm, and doubly so in this

Editorial: Big crops on the horizon

Editorial: Big crops on the horizon

There are some among us who plan their drive across the Canadian Prairies so they do most of it under the cover of darkness, ostensibly to avoid the tedium of vast horizons on which there is “nothing” to see. To each their own. I’ve taken that drive twice this spring — with the help of


Editorial: Brexit, red beans and rice

The plates served up to reporters attending a World Refugee Day event hosted by Canadian Foodgrains Bank June 20 were symbolic of rations for refugees displaced from their homes by war — red beans and rice. Three days later, the industrialized world was trying to swallow a heaping plate of Brexit — also symbolic —

Editorial: Time to change

Editorial: Time to change

Afew years back, while working as a writer for our sister publication Country Guide, I spoke at some length with Saskatchewan-based agriculture economist Murray Fulton, about how farm policy is typically set in Canada. He told me that what tends to happen is something he called “punctuated equilibrium” — which is to say that Canadian