If you had to, how would you rank the importance of food safety, the environment, animal welfare, the cost of food and health, as it relates to agricultural sustainability? Which is most important? Which matters less, relatively speaking? These are tough questions, certainly, but ones the agriculture industry needs to ask to better understand and... Read More
Category: Eastern Canada
Each year my agricultural communications students prepare university-level speeches to compete with others from across the country in the Canadian Young Speakers for Agriculture contest, held annually in early November at the Royal in Toronto. Sometimes they win, and sometimes they don’t, but at the very least they get an all-too-rare platform to stand up... Read More
Harvest is always a busy time and weather and mechanical delays are to be expected. But if all is going reasonably well and you've got several fields ready to harvest all at once, have you ever thought about the best way to prioritize harvesting one field over the other? Right now, there are still soybeans... Read More
Never say never will be the theme of this story. In a deal announced today, JBS (a Brazilian Packer) will take over the operation of the plant with the option to purchase the plant, the feedyard and the farm. A source informed us that XL Foods employees were told at 5 PM. According to the... Read More
Fall is a great time to do a few things: soil test, research soybean varieties for next year and test for soybean cyst nematode (SCN). The three tasks can actually be done simultaneously. As Albert Tenuta, field crop plant pathologist with OMAFRA, explains in this video, now is a great time to test for SCN.... Read More
In this second episode of the Real Leaders series, Kim McConnell asks Greg Stewart, Farm Credit Canada's CEO, about farmers' own perceptions of agriculture and how that impacts another generation of farmers. What's more, Stewart shares his insight into what, as an industry, agriculture must teach the public and the future generation about farming and... Read More
With less cattle slaughter capacity in Canada, many ranchers and feedyards are concerned about the possibility for the feeder cattle and live basis to significantly widen. A basis that gets too wide makes the current Canadian model unworkable. Currently the live cattle basis sites at 16-18 which is the same as last year at this... Read More
Better timing of manure application with in-crop needs was the motivation behind developing a new low disturbance, shallow injection manure application toolbar. The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Initiatives (OMAFRA), along with industry partners, developed the multi-coultered toolbar to try and find a made-in-Canada solution for in-crop manure applications for not just pastures... Read More
With yesterdays surprise announcement by Dalton McGuinty that he was stepping down as the Premier of Ontario, people took to twitter to speak out in favor and against the tenure of the resigning Premier. As we discussed yesterday, it would appear by the discussion on Twitter that Ontario farmers do not believe very strongly about... Read More
Larger discs sure do look menacing. They also require far more horsepower to pull, but they wear out more slowly than smaller-diameter discs. But there are two very important considerations when choosing planter disc size. The first is trash management (guess which one cuts through straw better? You may be surprised) and the second is... Read More