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


How low must we bend?

Reading Time: 2 minutes Most of us barely know what our forelock is, let alone how to tug it when we bow to the lord and lady of the manor. Nor do we know how incredibly close we came to having a landed aristocracy in Canada. All of us do sometimes wonder, however, if we could be evolving back […] 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


Surfing for perfect pork

Reading Time: 3 minutes I have a tech-savvy neighbour, Sully, who jets across the continent every week advising corporate moguls about social media in the Age of Information. Quite frequently, Sully and his gorgeous young wife Sophie take a drive up the Petunia Valley Sideroad (which we affectionately refer to as the off-ramp of the information highway) and join […] Read more

Machinery Guide

Reading Time: 3 minutes dynamic tire corporation galaxy ag radials The Galaxy line of agricultural tires are imported from China and compete on price. The company says they compete on performance too. The Galaxy line features many farm tires, with the Galaxy Ag Radial R-1 tractor tire offering a highly versatile multi-angle design. The Galaxy Ag Radial has a […] Read more


Carry the load

Reading Time: 4 minutes When Elaine stepped inside the Hanson Acres cleaning plant she found three generations of Hanson men all focused on the same thing. Her father-in-law Dale was balancing at the top of a six-foot ladder, trying to hold on to one end of an eight-foot iron shaft as he pulled it out of the fanning mill. […] Read more

Reading about you on Bay Street

Reading Time: 2 minutes I sometimes play with the idea of Country Guide publishing a series of business books based on the strategic insights we glean from the farmers in our stories. By that I don’t mean business books FOR farmers (really, that’s what we’re trying to do with every issue of Country Guide.) I mean business books for […] Read more