Your Own Paradise

Reading Time: 4 minutes There are lots of great things about life on the farm, but being able to shift gears may not be one of them. The farm is always there. Every view out every window makes you think of another job that needs to be added to a list that is already too long, and the views […] 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


Where’s The Wheat?

Reading Time: 6 minutes Canada may have been the world’s leading exporter of wheat through the 1920s but to anyone farming in the West today, that seems like a very, very long time ago. We have almost forgotten that for decades, wheat was the reason we called the Prairies the breadbasket of the world. Or that around the globe, […] Read more

PERFECT PLACE

Reading Time: 2 minutes At first glance, the Rosthern area might seem an unlikely location for any processor or manufacturer. After all, you can’t go much farther north before the road system begins to peter out, replaced by mile upon mile of bush and trees. Tucked in between the North and South Saskatchewan rivers, the region is undeniably scenic […] Read more


After Oil

Reading Time: 6 minutes Efforts to find alternatives to oil are slowly gaining momentum, pushed on by fears about dwindling reserves and global warming. Indeed, sometimes it seems that every newspaper you pick up has a story about one new answer or another, such as biogas, biodiesel or hydrogen among others. Yet no single fuel has emerged as the […] Read more

MORE THAN JUST GOOD TIMING

Reading Time: 2 minutes Jason Skotheim and his partners couldn’t have known it at the time, but their fledgling business was about to get a shot in the arm from events entirely beyond their control. It was late winter 2007 and Meg Smart, professor of small animal nutrition from the University of Saskatchewan’s Western College of Veterinary Medicine, recalls […] Read more


COUNTRY GUIDE’S Influential Farmers Most 12 In Canada

Reading Time: < 1 minute In Canadian agriculture, farmers do the pulling. Farmers are the ones taking the risks, dealing directly with the repercussions, sharing their first-hand experiences and applying new technologies and business models. Leadership grows on every farm, as it does in other business sectors too. What sets farming apart is how farmers excel at finding the extraordinary […] Read more

Kee Jim Okotoks, Alta.

Reading Time: 4 minutes KEE JIM HASN’T ALWAYS BEENthe most popular person in the Canadian livestock industry, but he is well known and respected. He’s a relatively young big-picture thinker, and over his 27 years of developing a successful feedlot consulting service, he has never shied from controversy. In fact, as the hint of mischief in his smile suggests, […] Read more


John Kolk Picture Butte, Alta.

Reading Time: 4 minutes THE INDUSTRY IS ALLOWINGits problems to define it rather than its opportunities,” says John Kolk, getting immediately to his point. As a third-generation grain farmer from southern Alberta, Kolk says agriculture’s brand is eroding, and there is a growing public perception that whiney “poor me” farmers are always looking for some form of government bailout. […] Read more

Flo Price Acme, ALTA.

Reading Time: 4 minutes IT’S WHAT MOST MOTHERS DO.Flo Price worked to instil a sense of independence in her children, plus a spirit of co-operation, a good work ethic and a desire to do well at all the tasks they took on. After all, those were the values she’d been raised with, and they were the values that Price, […] Read more