Reading Time: 8 minutes GUIDEPOSTS They’re standing-room only, virtually every time. Whether you’re in Alberta or maybe in Ontario, wherever local-food organizers put on speed-dating events, they’re jam-packed. Even better, the mix of “girls and boys” is exactly what farmers want, with eager food buyers outnumbering the farmers often by three to one, and sometimes more. Marlene Abrams of […] Read more
The bell is set to ring. Five minutes is all you get to make the first impression that might end up making your farm. Care to dance?
It may look like just a corn eating contest. But in Taber, Alta., it’s symbolic of a whole lot more, especially the tight links between farm and town that are making both more prosperous Taber Town
Reading Time: 10 minutes GUIDEPOSTS Agriculture reigns in Taber and everybody knows it the minute they hit the town limits. Driving in from the west, you pass the usual restaurants and gas stations, but mostly you notice the farm equipment dealers and agri-businesses standing shoulder to shoulder along Highway 3. Or if you make the trip in from the […] Read more
GROW SASKATOON
Reading Time: 9 minutes Saskatchewan has one of the most innovative bioscience clusters in the world,” beams a proud Bob Bjornerud, the province’s minister of agriculture. Saskatchewan is home to 30 per cent of Canada’s ag biotech industry, along with row after row of crops and genetics companies. But if Saskatchewan is hot, Saskatoon is exploding. Bjornerud credits it […] Read more
Company Men
Reading Time: 3 minutes Guideposts The prevailing wisdom seems to be that this operation will be like so many others, a brief flash in the pan followed by a quick collapse, and then maybe a chance to pick up a tractor or combine on the cheap at the auction sale. At coffee shops, elevators and kitchen tables, and on […] Read more
Plain, NOT SIMPLE
Reading Time: 12 minutes GUIDEPOSTS What I hadn’t expected was how easy it would be for a journalist they’d never met to arrange a visit. When I cold-called James Hofer, the hog manager of Starlite Colony, a Hutterite community near Starbuck just 40 minutes from the bustle of downtown Winnipeg, I wasn’t sure how he’d respond. Would a group […] Read more
Ontario’s Dairy Jewel
Reading Time: 11 minutes My father heaved great sighs as we drove along. In the seat beside him, I was a young girl accompanying her Dad to dairy cattle sales in Tavistock, in the heart of Ontario’s Oxford county, and already I knew that these were sighs mixed with admiration and jealousy. “Ohh,” he would say, “see the corn […] Read more
Dare To Compare?
Reading Time: 3 minutes TULARE, CALIFORNIA WHERE Tulare is in the San Joaquin Valley. California is the top U.S. dairy state, surpassing Wisconsin in 1993. NUMBER OF DAIRY FARMS 332 farms with almost half a million milk cows, nearly one million cattle. COWS PER FARM 1,450 cows per farm TOTAL PRODUCTION Last year the dairy farms in Tulare produced […] Read more
Fresh Start
Reading Time: 6 minutes you’ll only be good enough to milk cows on my family’s farm,” a fellow student once jeered at Mathieu Barbeau. “In a few years,” came Barbeau’s answer, “I’ll be big enough to buy you out.” Barbeau, now 28, figured the odds were against him. Everyone else figured it too. He’d heard it hundreds of times […] Read more
Speed dating
Reading Time: 3 minutes They re standing-room only, virtually every time. Whether you re in Alberta or maybe in Ontario, wherever local-food organizers put on speed-dating events, they re jam-packed. Even better, the mix of girls and boys is exactly what farmers want, with eager food buyers outnumbering the farmers often by three to one, and sometimes more. Marlene […] Read more
Taber town
Reading Time: 2 minutes Agriculture reigns in Taber and everybody knows it the minute they hit the town limits. Driving in from the west, you pass the usual restaurants and gas stations, but mostly you notice the farm equipment dealers and agribusinesses standing shoulder to shoulder along Highway 3. Or if you make the trip in from the east, […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
