Reading Time: 3 minutes I took the family to one of the neighbourhood parties at the Fisher place down on the River Road over the holidays. It was a pretty typical mix of farm and small-town families. The men stood in the heated garage, holding beers and moaning about the price of pinto beans and foliar fungicides. The women […] Read more
Saving face on the Sideroad
Big Idea: Ag and the rest
If you just looked at the raw numbers, you’d think that agriculture is waning in importance in Canada. You might even think it’s an industry in decline.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Country Guide: Should we be concerned that agriculture seems to be slipping in its importance to the Canadian economy? At eight per cent of GDP, it’s not insignificant, but there are other countries out there — say Brazil for example — where agriculture retains a far-higher proportion. Al Mussell: As much as we all have […] Read moreMachinery Guide, April 2012
It’s all about speed, power and efficiency when it comes to today’s self-propelled field sprayers. In this issue, we take a closer look to find where those differences start.
Reading Time: 3 minutes Rogator rg900, rg1100 and rg1300 Rogator RG900, RG1100 and RG1300 sprayers are designed to move quickly and easily among a wide variety of crops, crop heights and field conditions. According to Rogator, their drive package also gives you more horsepower than ever before and matches it to the payload capacity, giving you more consistent […] Read moreThe end of summer
Reading Time: 2 minutes There won’t be any more recessions. I remember being told this by a good friend who has done all sorts of impressive things with Deloitte and who has all sorts of letters after his name. It was around the turn of the millennium, and his point was that economists had finally learned enough about the […] Read more
Reflections, April 2012
Reading Time: 2 minutes The Commissionaire on duty at Depot, the RCMP training academy in Regina, hands me my room keys. “Breakfast is at 6:45 a.m. and your course begins at 8 a.m.” My room, usually occupied by police cadets, is basic but comfortable. I don’t need the lock box for a firearm so I lock up my truck […] Read more
Trouble comes to the farm
Reading Time: 4 minutes Everything was ready to go. With another week or so of warm weather, the Hansons would be ready to start putting seed in the ground. They planned to seed as much of their 6,000 acres as they could get on to — anything that wasn’t still too wet after last year’s flood. The machinery had […] Read more
A farmer’s hierarchy of needs
Reading Time: 3 minutes In the same way that spring produces the first gin and tonic moments on the veranda and frog songs that waft up from the marsh in the evening, it also produces two famous lists on the fridge: those things which must be done and another that fantasizes what might be done if we had the […] Read more
Here’s why 2012 will be different
Reading Time: 2 minutes 2008 revolutionized our expectations for commodity prices but it didn’t put an end to sleepless nights on the farm. 2012 will see farmers taking more control. Here are three of the ways they’ll do it. 1. Roughly one-third of our farms have no successors. On another third, there’s a chance that the children might want […] Read more
Machinery Guide, January 2012
For most of us, it’s this simple. If you plant crops, you spray crops. Getting herbicides and crop protectants down uniformly and on time is essential. There’s no other word for it. Still, it doesn’t have to mean a self-propelled sprayer. Today’s new generation of pull-type sprayers provide an unbeatable blend of cost and performance for many farms. You also get myriad choices, including these.
Reading Time: 3 minutes MS Gregson N1000 and N1250 Sprayers MS Gregson Novation sprayers come in N1000-gallon and N1250-gallon models, with a Novation design that is targeted toward operators who want a simple, clean sprayer with a rate controller and 60- to 90-foot booms. Gregson representative Lyle McLean says the Novation sprayer is the very first pull-type sprayer […] Read moreThe vision thing
No one seemed to need one before, but now they say a vision statement can be good for the farm. Dale isn’t sure. Even Donna isn’t convinced, but the kids are already talking...
Reading Time: 4 minutes It was only mid-morning when Jeff and Elaine walked across the farmyard to his parents’ house, but his Mom and Dad already looked exhausted. “We thought you’d never get here,” his dad Dale said with an exaggerated sigh of relief. “Sorry,” Elaine said, setting her laptop down in the kitchen. “We thought about picking him […] Read moreA message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
