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“With technology, if you come late to the party on a disruption, once you realize you’ve been disrupted, you can never fix it,” says Wade Barnes.
Guide Business

Our ‘Amazon moment’

As Wade Barnes sees it, farms and farm suppliers can either embrace today’s tech disruption, or get ready to sell to those who will

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Reading Time: 5 minutes More ag companies are testing the winds of change. They believe agriculture is on the cusp of another technological revolution, this time fueled by digitization and online connectivity. This revolution will bring risk, and it will bring opportunity. And, for sure, it will bring disruption. It will change what it takes to be successful, both […] Read more
New Hampshire farmers Dorn and Sarah Cox.
Guide Business

The open source farmer

For Dorn and Sarah Cox, building an ag internet will bring the power back in farmer’s hands

By
Reading Time: 7 minutes About 10 years ago, New Hampshire farmer Dorn Cox was thinking how agriculture will need new ways of tackling such huge challenges as climate change, biodiversity loss and depleted agricultural soils. In the past, the collaborative approach had always saved agriculture. Farmers have pooled their ideas, shared their results and found big solutions much faster […] Read more
In the not-too-distant future, a farmer’s job will be more about managing data than managing soil.
Guide Business, Management

Farming in 2030: Big data

The last time there was a change this big in farming, it was mechanization. The question is: are you open to exploring how it can work for you?

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Reading Time: 5 minutes If you’ve got a cell phone anywhere close to you as you read this, you’re part of the data revolution in agriculture, whether you realize it or not, and whether you want to be or not. That’s probably a good thing. Certainly, the potential benefits are amazing. “The smartphone is going to be one of […] Read more
Cereals, Crops

Four ways to manage lodging in wheat

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When it comes to lodging in spring wheat, there aren’t a lot of current resources or guidelines available to western Canadian producers, but researchers are hoping to provide some good recommendations over the next couple of years.A lot of the research into wheat lodging to date has been done in the United Kingdom, where lodging[...]
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With a third of Canada’s agricultural workforce nearing retirement, the farm labour issue looms large and it will become a huge issue for farms in the 2020s.
Guide Business, Guide HR

The overseas employee

If we look to 2030, where will we find our farm employees?

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Reading Time: 4 minutes Agriculture is already looking outside the agricultural community — and in some cases outside the country — to recruit workers. That’s only going to intensify if, as expected, rural populations stagnate or decline, and if farms consolidate and rely more on hired employees. It’s also worth noting that 112,000 of today’s employees (37 per cent[...]
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Guide Business, Management

Farming in 2030: Managing risk

Innovative insurance companies reveal how on-farm data is leading to next-generation policies that increase liquidity and profitability

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Reading Time: 6 minutes As farming gets ever more expensive and as margins get tighter, there’s less room for error, which means the need for risk management isn’t going away in the next 10 years. What will change, though, is the type of insurance products farmers will be able to buy, with innovations driven primarily by technology and by[...]
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The next decade could see a return to smaller fields due to the higher-intensity management made possible by driverless technology such as the DOT.
Crops, Equipment

Changes in agriculture are coming your way

These production challenges mean we’ll all have to stay sharp through the 2020s

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Reading Time: 4 minutes Just because we can predict many of the production challenges heading our way doesn’t mean they’ll be easier to avoid, or that they’ll be easier to manage. In fact, by the time the new decade starts winding down in 2030, Canadian producers will have their hands just as full as they are today, if not[...]
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Talking about your future plans and how you want to grow is important.
Guide Business, Succession strategy

Getting inside a retiring farmer’s head

Knowing the questions that your older neighbours are asking themselves as they start winding down their farms could give you the inside track

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Reading Time: 9 minutes Mom and Dad just had coffee with their neighbour, talking about how it’s time to start preparing for retirement. Not just thinking about it, but actually doing it. They’re only a fenceline apart, but they’re in very different situations, though, which for farmers in the area who want to expand could make all the difference.[...]
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Many major trends experts foresee are already underway and will continue to play out in the ag sector over the next decade and beyond.
Features, Guide Business

What the future farm could look like in 2030

Future farm: Maybe it seems more like fiction today, but every year brings this picture of the future closer

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Reading Time: 6 minutes Big change is coming. In the words of Shrek, “Change is good, Donkey!” It’s also inevitable, which farmers probably know more than anyone else. There are, of course, differing opinions about what farming will look like 10 years from now. Will farms be larger? Probably. Will weather be more unpredictable? Almost certainly. Will technologies like[...]
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University of Manitoba associate professor Yvonne Lawley and graduate student Virginia Janzen have just begun a trial at Carman Research Farm to assess the impact of different termination dates for a fall rye cover crop seeded with soybeans the following spring.
Crops, Soybeans

Seeding soybeans into rye

Green growth in spring helps to manage excess moisture, provides early-season protection from soil erosion, and also suppresses weeds

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Reading Time: 5 minutes Grain farmers across Western Canada are showing interest in cover crops, but few have taken the step, as many North Dakota farmers have, of green-seeding soybeans in the spring into a fall rye cover crop. “The context of green seeding is to push that shoulder season fallow period out of the rotation by using annuals[...]
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AGCanadaTV: In Case You Missed It – Your National Ag News Recap for the week ending March 27, 2020.

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