Anyone who has operated or worked on repairing machinery has from time to time cursed the engineer who came up with an awkward design, or when fighting with a part that is nearly impossible to remove and replace when it fails. But what if one of the major brands knocked on your door and asked[...]
The diversity gap
Canada’s population is becoming increasingly diverse. Statistics Canada estimates that immigrants made up roughly 22 per cent of the population in 2016, and our country expects to welcome over 400,000 more per year until 2024. This will almost certainly result in a continually growing percentage of visible minorities among Canada’s working age people over the[...]
Into the future
While it’s not exactly as futuristic as 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s no longer such a big stretch to imagine the day when a single operator anywhere in the world can remotely control 25 to 30 tractors, and when our crops effectively send us emails letting us know what they need. As professor and chair[...]
Why Kubota thinks you’ll buy more of its farm equipment
As I walked through Kubota’s new headquarters in Grapevine, Texas, one particular observation stood out to me. In other companies’ offices and engineering centres that I’ve visited, there was never any shortage of images of the brand’s machines lining the hallway walls. The offices in the Kubota building were stylish and comfortable with plenty of[...]
It’s YOUR farm data
Long before the social media scandal that rocked Facebook and bankrupted Cambridge Analytica, Kelly Bronson was looking into how data is collected, who uses it and how they are benefitting from it in Canada’s agri-food sector. “For a couple of years, I’ve been doing qualitative research into the social scientific aspect of data collection in[...]
How "free" is the free trade in agricultural equipment?
In the last few years, we’ve heard a lot of passionate political speeches about so-called free trade agreements. It’s a topic that is really more than a century old in this country, going back as far as 1911 when the failed push for “Reciprocity” between Canada and the U.S. made headlines as a hot-button issue.[...]
Satellites and ag drones link up
For “eye-in-the-sky” technology, the last three years have seen some stunning advances, especially in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and satellite imaging systems. Yet while both made headlines about the same time in 2011, both also had limited success on the farm, as is often the case when new technologies first get into[...]
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
