While most pastures across Saskatchewan were blanketed with snow this past winter, the landscape will change quickly as warm weather arrives. Native prairie plants such as northern wheatgrass and needle-and-thread will soon spring to life, however their undesirable counterparts, such as leafy spurge, will too. Leafy spurge is a perennial invasive weed many farmers and... Read More
Category: Western Canada
Update, March 29: Bill C-49 passed third reading in the Senate on Thursday afternoon, sending the bill, with the Senate's amendments, back to the House of Commons for MPs to consider after the two-week Easter break. The Senate transport committee has approved several changes to Bill C-49 that had been requested by farm groups. After... Read More
The Manitoba government has decided it will not apply a carbon tax to fuels used for heating or cooling barns and greenhouses or to run grain dryers — an exemption that was not announced when the Pallister government rolled out its carbon pricing plan last fall. The province originally said farm diesel and gasoline would... Read More
Farmers Business Network (FBN) has initiated an aggressive plan to expand into Canada. Launched as a Silicon Valley start-up with backing from venture capital funds in 2015, FBN started as a platform for aggregating data across millions of acres to provide U.S. farmers with information for crop input purchasing and agronomic decisions. Since then, FBN... Read More
In this piece: A brief background on the Cambridge Analytica situation | Personal data - do we know what we're signing up for? | Mental health - how does using social media make us feel? | Will you #deletefacebook? We've known for a while that social media is a complicated beast, especially as it relates... Read More
Camso is giving new life to worn tracks. Earlier this month, the Quebec-based company unveiled its certified remanufactured program, giving farmers the ability to rebuild and reuse worn tracks. “When customers participate in our program, Camso takes their old tracks and puts new tread bars on the carcass, remanufacturing the used tracks and giving them... Read More
Grain markets this week took a bit of a geopolitical hit with a subdued approach to more talk of trade war. Specifically, this week, U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans to place tariffs on about $50 billion worth of Chinese imports. But China isn't ready to be pushed around. On Friday, the country announced a... Read More
As a snowstorm bears down on the prairies just in time for spring calving, the cattle markets continue their slide downwards, and futures markets try to figure out how low they have to go to clear additional product in the value chain. That's where we start this week's discussion from Beef Market Update analyst Anne... Read More
The resolution at which farm equipment can treat a field continues to shrink, automatically adjusting rates on-the-fly to account for variability in a field rather than treating an entire field the same. To use an inkjet printer analogy, today's equipment is increasingly capable of "printing" pixels that are only metres or even centimetres in size... Read More
The latest Grocery Trade Report tells the story of more sales to the U.S., Canadians choosing to cook at home, and a (perhaps surprisingly) small shift to online food sales. Kevin Grier, with KG Market Analysis and Consulting, says that 2017 was a pretty strong year for the grocery industry in Canada. Of note, packaged... Read More