Making a comeback

New Holland’s restructured management team has launched an aggressive plan to push the company back into the spotlight


Reading Time: 4 minutes New Holland is back,” Abe Hughes II, the company’s vice-president of sales and marketing for North America declared to a group of farm writers in late April at the company’s North American headquarters in Pennsylvania. It was just one sentence, but it is worth coming over 1,500 miles to hear. In a very real sense, […] Read more

The storm’s aftermath

Reading Time: 4 minutes The heavy rain turned to hail. From the living room window Jeff saw pea-sized stones hit his front lawn. Elaine carried their little boy crying in from the bedroom. “He’s terrified,” she said. “Come here,” Jeff said, taking the frightened toddler in his arms and holding him up to the window. “See? This is why […] Read more


Machinery Guide

On more and more farms, the grain cart is as vital to getting the crop out of the field as the combine. That’s increasingly true regardless of farm size, with many smaller operations pencilling out the advantages that come from their enhanced efficiency. Whether your operation is expanding or specializing, grain cart manufacturers are tweaking their designs to take those efficiencies to new heights, as you’ll see from this month’s brief survey of some of the newest models.

Reading Time: 2 minutes J&M LEANER  As farms get bigger, so do combine headers, and one challenge growers face in the field is overlaps between the grain cart and the combine. But J&M grain carts have an answer, with the Leaner series for 1,130-, 1,250- and 1,500-bushel capacities. The Leaner is an extender that is bolted on to […] Read more

The stars align

Reading Time: 3 minutes In the middle of August, my neighbour Vern Bunton and his son were leaning on the box of my half-ton down by the mailbox enjoying a visit, when I made a polite remark about the lovely crop of beans young Matthew had grown on 50 acres across the road. This was Matthew’s first crop and […] Read more


The storm’s aftermath

Reading Time: 4 minutes The heavy rain turned to hail. From the living room window Jeff saw pea-sized stones hit his front lawn. Elaine carried their little boy crying in from the bedroom. “He’s terrified,” she said. “Come here,” Jeff said, taking the frightened toddler in his arms and holding him up to the window. “See? This is why […] Read more

Looking for what doesn’t change

Reading Time: 2 minutes I’ve said it before, but it remains true. The big thing non-farmers don’t understand about farming is that so much of it hinges on decision-making. It’s one of the constants in agriculture.Farmers wrestle with more tough decisions in a year than many of their city cousins face in their entire careers, and not just because […] Read more


The unexpected house guest

Reading Time: 4 minutes Donna heard a knock at the door and frenzied shouting. “Are you home? Can we come in?” Donna’s daughter-in-law Elaine was carrying her toddler under her arm. The little boy looked happy to see his grandma, but Elaine was red-faced and frantic. “That chimney! We’ll get rabies! In our own home.” Donna had never seen […] Read more

10,000 years of bad food

Reading Time: 3 minutes My grandfather was a part-time medical doctor and a full-time food nut. He’s been gone for 40 years now but I still think of him pretty much every time I open the fridge. He hopped from one loony idea to another over the course of his career, lecturing his patients and every member of his […] Read more


Future farming

If you’re in the agriculture industry the prevailing wisdom is clear. Global agriculture has an enormous — maybe insurmountable — challenge ahead of it. By 2050, our global population will reach nine billion.


Reading Time: 5 minutes Big Idea Christophe Pelletier: The key challenge is going to be feeding the animals, not the people. Everything is so much more global and interconnected that there really is no such thing as a local solution to these issues — and that has implications all over the place. For example let’s look at the implications […] Read more

Machinery Guide

Getting that crop into the ground quickly, accurately and on time is crucial. Increasingly on today’s farms, innovative air seeders and drills can help us do just that. It’s all about air, and it’s also all about precision placement of seed and fertilizer, which is why this edition of Machinery Guide is all about air seeders.

Reading Time: 3 minutes horsch anderson planting systems ps 40-15 ps 60-15  Horsch Anderson offers the 60-ft. PS 60-15 and 40-ft. PS 40-15 air drills. Both drills have a 19-ft. transport width and a 16-ft. transport height. The five-section PS 60-15 has 48 openers versus 32 for the three-section PS 40-15. These “planting systems” can be used for […] Read more