Reading Time: 9 minutes If all the Canadian Wheat board did was sell wheat, it would be so much easier to figure out where you go from here. Not that it would be easy even then, of course. the board’s marketing clout has been felt across Canada and around the world, making it arguably the single most powerful institution […] Read more
Can We Get There From Here?
Cooking Up A Profit
Reading Time: 10 minutes At some point or other, everyone who has gone to farm meetings has had the valueadded sermon preached at them. The basic speech comes with a few variations, but regardless whether it’s delivered by a slick consultant, an earnest public servant or even just a smart-aleck journalist, it always comes with the same main points. […] Read more
BIG IDEA Taking Ownership
Reading Time: 6 minutes We all love technology. From the shiniest new tablet computer to the genes that power your crops, we’re all benefiting every day. Of course, the companies that develop these technologies say they deserve to benefit too. They say that intellectual property rights — from patents and trademarks to plant breeders rights — are crucial to […] Read more
The rise of iFarmer
Reading Time: 4 minutes Three generations ago Canadian farmers got their market information from the local elevator and their weekly farm paper. A generation on, they shushed the kids and strained to hear the markets on the CBC’s noon-hour farm report. Just a generation ago, a handful took the electronic plunge and bought a DTN system that gave them […] Read more
I Farmer Here At Last
Reading Time: 7 minutes Three generations ago Canadian farmers got their market information from the local elevator and their weekly farm paper. A generation on, they shushed the kids and strained to hear the markets on the CBC’s noon-hour farm report. Then just one generation ago, a handful took the electronic plunge and bought a DTN system that gave […] Read more
BIG IDEA Paying The GMO Cost
Reading Time: 6 minutes Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably formed an opinon about NDP agriculture critic Alex Atamanenko and his doomed private members’ bill on biotech crops. The bill itself wasn’t complex. At under 100 words, it couldn’t be. But it was big, calling for “an analysis of potential harm to export markets” prior to […] Read more
A Dog’s Life
Reading Time: 5 minutes Often farmers look at the urban man-dog relationship and shake their heads, asking how does that make sense. But when one Prairie grain farmer looked at that same picture, his question was different. Jason Skotheim asked, how can I get a piece of that? If you grew up on a farm, there’s a fairly high […] Read more
John Bennett Biggar, Sask.
Reading Time: 4 minutes IT WAS ON HIS FARMin the early 1980s that John Bennett first came to stare the reality of soil erosion in the face. It had been a wet season and rain throughout July had already saturated his soils. Then came one of those fierce summer storms that the Prairies are famous for, unleashing a torrent […] Read more
Ian Cushon Oxbow, Sask.
Reading Time: 3 minutes THERE IS A LONG LISTof reasons why organic farming has grown so fast on the Canadian Prairies, yet not many of those reasons are actually pro-organic, at least at first blush. For instance, there was the decades-long crunch in commodity prices that forced many farmers to consider something new, plus the undeniable reality that the […] Read more
Owen McAuley MCAULEY, Man.
Reading Time: 4 minutes IN THE WINTER OF 1991,Owen McAuley, who operates a 6,000-acre grain and livestock operation near the western Manitoba village named after his family, was standing on stage receiving a great honour — he’d just been named Manitoba’s Farmer of the Year. As McAuley stood there at the podium, he felt a bit of a fraud. […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
