If farmers want to supersize their corn yields, they have to challenge conventional thinking and become students of the crop. That was the main message National Corn Growers Association yield contest champion Randy Dowdy shared with hundreds of farmers at the 2016 SouthWest Agricultural Conference in Ridgetown, Ontario earlier this week. In 2014, Dowdy set... Read More
Category: Western Canada
Happy New Year! We're talking about 500 bushel/acre corn, a wheat breeding breakthrough and much more on this week's news podcast:
Quality and consistency. That's what international buyers expect with Canadian wheat. It's been said a thousand times already, but if you ask Saskatchewan farmer Gerrid Gust what his take-home message was after visiting customers in North Africa and the Middle East, he can't help but emphasize the importance of maintaining Canada's reputation for quality and... Read More
We're told it's neither an Autobot, nor a Decepticon, though its name and hydraulic capabilities might suggest otherwise. The Peecon Gull Wing was inspired by a desire for dual wheels and a need to comply to road width regulations. It enables the transition of rear dual wheels from working mode to travel, where they are... Read More
An international group of scientists working on mapping the genetic code for wheat say they've reached a major milestone that will help them reach their goal several years earlier than expected. The International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium project, which is co-led by two Canadians and partly funded by Canadian farmers, announced yesterday it has produced... Read More
When a business expands into international markets, it faces a whole new set of challenges ranging from culture and language barriers to politics and regulation. For Farmer's Edge, a global provider of precision agriculture and variable rate technology, even things we take for granted in North America — like cell signal, or relatively fast adoption... Read More
Winnipeg-based special crops marketing company Legumex Walker has cleared its final hurdle in winding down operations, announcing on Tuesday it has handed over its 84 percent stake in Pacific Coast Canola and PCC's troubled crush plant in Washington. The divestiture arrangement sees Glencore increase its ownership stake in PCC from 16 percent to 50 percent... Read More
If you’ve been attending agricultural conferences in the past few years, you’ve likely heard the phrase “social license to operate.” It essentially boils down to the approval of a certain industry by local communities and public stakeholders. With new regulations affecting farms, maintaining social license has become a priority for modern agriculture. At the 2015... Read More
J.P. Gervais, chief agricultural economist for Farm Credit Canada, in conversation with RealAgriculture's Debra Murphy at the 2015 Canadian Forage and Grasslands Association Conference in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (before mCOOL was repealed). 2015 saw some pretty incredible market pressures in the livestock sector, amidst overarching trade stories with the ongoing battle over country-of-origin labeling and the... Read More
7 to 10 plants per square foot is still the target plant population when seeding canola. That hasn't changed, but some of the practices used and the way we think about achieving an ideal plant stand might need to be re-evaluated. For example, research has shown that stand establishment is generally higher with a lower... Read More