Last week at the National Cattleman's Beef Association meeting in Nashville, I attended NCBA's annual International Trade Committee meeting. With the all of the stir created by President Trump on NAFTA and TPP, the committee meeting on Friday afternoon could not have been more timely. One of the speakers was international trade lawyer Gary Horlick.... Read More
Category: Western Canada
How healthy is your soil? If you want to know all you have to do is bury your underwear, says Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) soil management specialist Adam Hayes. Last summer, Hayes helped members of the Renfrew County Soil and Crop Improvement Association bury underwear in their fields to determine... Read More
This is an op-ed submitted by Levi Wood, Saskatchewan wheat farmer and president of the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association; and Jason Scott, U.S. Wheat Associates chair and Maryland wheat farmer. Since the end of the Canadian Wheat Board’s government monopoly control over the marketing of western Canadian wheat, there has been a great deal... Read More
When you're on the hunt for that new seed drill one of the major consideration is row width configurations. There continues to be an influx of European thought on cereal production with the push to run sub-7.5 inch row widths. Some would argue that Ontario growers have gone narrower at a faster rate than Western... Read More
Managing a feedyard used to be fairly simple. You bought the cattle, you processed the cattle, the cattle were fed, and then sold. And that process repeated itself. In 2017, this kind of lack of attention to detail is a money-losing guarantee. Collecting data and understanding what is happening in your feedyard is essential to... Read More
One of the highlights of every NCBA Trade Show and Convention is the release of the Cattlefax report. Cattlemen and women from across North America gather on the Thursday morning to hear the full-hour presentation by the Cattlefax team. Shaun was able to catch up with market analyst Kevin Good on the trade show floor... Read More
Bad experiences with high disease levels in last year's crop are making acreage projections for Western Canada in 2017 a tad more complicated than normal. "This year has been a lot more guess work. We have things we're just not sure about because the price signals on durum are actually looking pretty favourable, the price... Read More
It’s pretty hard to beat food. We need it, we like it, and it can be an incredibly significant part of who we are. As any shopper knows, though, food can also be expensive. The good news for us Canadians is our national food dollar isn’t actually that high. Despite what our grocery bills suggest,... Read More
While work continues on attracting a soybean processing plant to southern Manitoba, plans for a US$240 million soybean crush facility in North Dakota were announced on Tuesday. Governor Doug Burgum and representatives from Minnesota Soybean Processors (MnSP) and its North Dakota subsidiary formally unveiled the proposal to build a crush facility and refinery at Spiritwood,... Read More
Count pastured chicken production as another frontier for automation and robotics in agriculture. With demand for pastured chicken rising rapidly, Manitoba farmer Daniel Badiou, through his startup Ukko Robotics, has started manufacturing automated mobile chicken coops. That's right. They're basically robots for raising chickens outside. "Every day it will move by itself, and it can... Read More