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Feed weekly outlook: Seasonal restrictions underpin grains

Coronavirus fallout being watched

Reading Time: < 1 minute MarketsFarm — Seasonal weight restrictions and spring road bans are providing some underlying support for feed grain bids in Western Canada, with the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak also being followed closely. “Winter weights are coming off, which is restricting the areas (feedlots) can pull from,” said Allen Pirness, of MarketPlace Commodities in Lethbridge, adding “there’s a […] Read more

CDC Fraser shows good lodging resistance, an important trait for maintaining malting quality.

Balancing demands for both quality and yield in barley

New barley varieties show yield gains over old favourites AC Metcalfe and CDC Copeland. What’s needed now is industry acceptance

Reading Time: 4 minutes A quick scan of the farm press this spring might have been enough to convince you Canadian barley has a yield problem. The sharp drop in Prairie acreage suggests farmers may think the same thing — only 6.2 million acres were seeded last year, about two million less than 10 years earlier and half the […] Read more


The Canadian Grain Commission building on Main Street in Winnipeg. (File photo)

NFU sees red flags in CUSMA bill for grain growers

Bibeau urged to 'correct mistakes' in NAFTA 2.0-enabling legislation

Reading Time: 2 minutes The National Farmers Union is warning of sweeping changes to Canadian grain regulation it sees tucked into federal legislation meant to put through the successor deal to NAFTA. Bill C-4, the implementing legislation for the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), passed second reading Feb. 6 and came back without amendment Feb. 27 from the Commons standing committee […] Read more

(Photo courtesy Canada Beef Inc.)

Feed weekly outlook: Soft demand weighs on prices

Reading Time: < 1 minute MarketsFarm — Feed grain prices on the Prairies remain soft ahead of spring planting, due to quiet demand from feedlots. “Feedlots are full of grain right now,” Brandon Motz of CorNine Commodities at Lacombe, Alta. said, explaining that there’s currently a lot of grain in feeding pipelines. “Spring replacement into feedlots has been really slow.” […] Read more


Wheat leaf rust. (James Kolmer photo courtesy ARS/USDA)

Digital supercluster backs precision fungicide development

Project aims at wheat leaf rust, reducing pesticide load

Reading Time: 3 minutes A West Coast ag tech company in the crop pest control business is setting its sights on wheat leaf rust, with support from one of Canada’s five research superclusters — but not the cluster you might expect. Out of the five federally-supported superclusters launched in early 2018, Protein Industries Canada has been most closely linked […] Read more

As seeding season approaches, a new seed royalty pilot is getting off the ground, to some controversy.  Photo: File

Seed pilot project unveiled

Reading Time: 4 minutes The new Seed Variety Use Agreement (SVUA) pilot project, unveiled in Winnipeg Feb. 25, will demonstrate the benefits of farmers paying breeders a royalty for seed saved for planting. But the Prairies’ five wheat and barley commissions have “significant concern” about the project, they said in a news release. The SVUA pilot is being organized […] Read more


“As a grain farmer, I felt I needed to be part of that conversation,” says Shelley Spruit. Canadians were turning away from the foods our farmers grow, creating a unique business opportunity.

A hunger for opportunity

From their eastern Ontario farm, Shelley Spruit is rediscovering old wheats, and how to turn consumer trends into an impressive, farm-based business plan

Reading Time: 9 minutes Shelley Spruit likes to say she began a thriving farm business with a single cup of seed. In fact, there’s a certain rightness to her choosing those exact words, as if it was a recipe. After all, Spruit can run a kitchen and turn out five-course meals just as well as she operates a farm […] Read more



File photo of a canola field in northern France’s Normandy region. (Brasil2/iStock/Getty Images)

Lower grain production predicted from Europe in 2020

Reading Time: < 1 minute MarketsFarm — European grain production is expected to be down slightly in 2020, according to the first forecast for the year from European trade association Coceral. In the report, released Thursday, Coceral pegged total grain production for the European Union and United Kingdom in 2020 at 302.7 million tonnes, which would be down from the […] Read more