The Canadian dollar could be settling in for some quieter time after a wild ride over the last year. In May 2015, the loonie traded at over 83 cents US. It then went for a slide, bottoming out in mid-January at around 68 cents before rallying aggressively, touching 80 cents in early May. The dollar... Read More
Category: Podcasts
The online sharing concept that has produced Uber, Airbnb and other examples of peer-to-peer services aimed at better utilizing existing capital is developing in the U.S. farm machinery market. MachineryLink Sharing, which launched in the fourth quarter of 2015, bills itself as the industry's first internet-based equipment sharing program. Farmers, and even some equipment dealers,... Read More
Coming off record global production last year, world wheat supplies are massive. And yet, growing year-over-year ending stocks have not translated into a major decline in cash wheat bids for Canadian farmers. That's mainly due to two related factors: the weak Canadian dollar and tightening Canadian supplies — a function of the weak dollar driving... Read More
The number of cattle on feed in Canada is continuing to grow, according to the May report from CanFax. Part of the reason numbers are climbing, senior analyst Brian Perillat explains, is more heifers are going into feedlots. "We always gauge that as an appetite for expansion and unfortunately it still looks like quite a... Read More
Granular phosphorus fertilizer recovered from liquid hog manure could be a viable alternative to traditional 11-52 monoammonium phosphate (MAP) fertilizer for growing wheat and canola, according to research done at the University of Manitoba. Struvite "looks like a fantastic fertilizer," says Don Flaten, U of M soil scientist and one of the authors of a... Read More
Canola supplies will likely be tight leading up to harvest this fall, and could be even tighter in 2017 based on StatsCan estimates, average yields and demand trends. "The market is definitely telling us supplies are not going to be as abundant as what we've had over the last few years, and I would say... Read More
Rain, and even some snow, has slowed seeding progress on the prairies, but nobody's complaining. Cool temperatures, meanwhile, are hampering planting in Ontario and creating some nutrient issues, as we hear from Whete Pete. There are new reports of Bayer and BASF considering bids for Monsanto, soybean markets soared thanks to the USDA and barbecue... Read More
Wondering why your winter wheat is looking so...blah? Or how it can be safe to seed soybeans when it's still cold outside? Peter Johnson, resident agronomist for RealAgriculture, returns to answer questions and share his agronomic insight in his weekly update — the Word. Have a question for Wheat Pete? Call 1-888-746-3311, send him a... Read More
In the pursuit of healthy living, we're working against some pretty incredible obstacles, like 6 million years of evolutionary biology and 15 thousand years of human civilization. At least, that's how founding director of Yale University's Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center and president of the American College of Livestyle Medicine, David Katz explains it. "We live... Read More
Early last week, leaders from the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (CRSB) met with Earls Restaurants to discuss sustainable sourcing. By mid-week, the company announced it had made a mistake. "I think it was unfortunate that it happened in the first place," Fawn Jackson, executive director of the CRSB, told Shaun Haney in an interview,... Read More