Reading Time: 7 minutes Crops diseases are always a risk for grain growers. Be it rust in the 1950s, fusarium in the 1990s or clubroot today, it seems there’s always a new pestilence lurking just around the corner. Country Guide spoke to crop disease specialists from the three Prairie provinces late this fall about what they saw in the […] Read more
2015 crop disease outlook
The 2014 growing season saw some serious disease outbreaks, and it looks like 2015 will too
Grain wreck: Weaknesses in the freight system
The big crop and awful winter weren’t the only causes of 2014’s rail fiasco, says transport expert Mark Hemmes. There are also deep systemic issues that must be resolved
Reading Time: 3 minutes If there’s anyone out there with a bird’s eye view of the rail system and exactly what happened last winter, it’s Quorum Corporation’s Mark Hemmes. The organization is the federally appointed monitor of grain transportation, charged with tracking how efficiently grain is moved out of the Prairies following partial deregulation of grain transportation around the […] Read more
Making sense of ag markets
Agriculture can’t escape global economic trends, but farmers can adapt their market plans to key numbers. In this second of five columns, market analyst Errol Anderson tells us how
Reading Time: 7 minutes Grain prices rise, and grain prices fall. Sometimes it’s a straight supply issue. more grain gets produced, or less gets produced, and prices react accordingly. but those movements tend to happen over the short term. Often too, they’re tough to plan for because they’re sparked by either good weather or bad. Other issues hit on […] Read more
Opportunities in grain marketing
In a tough market, everyone says “shop your grain around.” But what’s the best way to do that?
Reading Time: 5 minutes With strong grain prices over the past few years, marketing has been relatively easy. Sure, there’s been the perennial question of whether the market will go higher or lower. But finding profitable prices wasn’t exactly searching for a needle in a haystack. As long as they got the yield in the field, profits were largely […] Read more
Moving grain to market
Truckers and farmers are still figuring each other out following a massive move to hired transport
Reading Time: 6 minutes The 2014 crop is in the bin, and farmers now face their two perennial post-harvest challenges. They must market their grains and oilseeds amid a challenging world scene, and they must move those harvests efficiently off the farm. Over the past 20 years, the way they’ve done that second job has changed dramatically. Back when […] Read more
Opportunities in hemp opening up
U.S. farmers are about to get into the hemp game — but longtime players here in Canada have a business plan to win the day
Reading Time: 5 minutes Canada is the big player in the North American hemp business. In fact until very recently, it was the only player. That’s because of the controversial history of the crop, which had been banned north and south of the border since the 1930s because it was lumped together with its psychoactive cousin, marijuana. In Canada, […] Read more
A woman’s place
Agriculture used to be a man’s world, at least in North America. But visit any agriculture college across the country and you’ll see that the times have already changed
Reading Time: 7 minutes At the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Agriculture, Dean Mary Buhr doesn’t spend much time fretting over whether women are being accepted in the agriculture industry. Long gone are the days when female students were seen as a novelty or as brave trailblazers. These days, they’re just students, and Buhr is surrounded every day by […] Read more
The straight goods on straight cutting crops
Straight cutting has the potential to make canola harvest much more efficient, so we ask one of the West’s top researchers about the state of the art
Reading Time: 5 minutes Just 20 years ago, virtually every acre of Western Canada was swathed before it ever saw a combine. But then a few things started to fall into place — mainly cheaper off-patent glyphosate — that meant farmers could stop the growth of their crops and get them to dry them down more quickly and uniformly. […] Read more
Are the current low grain prices a challenge, or opportunity?
The irony is, it’s often easier to expand in tough times
Reading Time: 7 minutes It felt like it was going to be different this time. In 2008, when the bull run in grain prices really kicked off, that was the sense that swept through the grain industry. Finally, the world was going to have to ante up and pay farmers a fair price for their products. And keep paying […] Read more
The do’s and don’ts of clubroot
Specific, timely actions can help prevent the spread of disease in your soil
Reading Time: 2 minutes By now it’s clear. Some control strategies work. Others, says Dan Orchard, just don’t. Pulling plants from dead patches at the end of the season and looking for the disease certainly worked. But it would have worked even better if the recommendation right from the start had been to pull plants and check the roots. […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
