(Dave Bedard photo)

Burger King pledges to end deforestation by 2030

Reading Time: 2 minutes Rio de Janeiro | Thomson Reuters Foundation — The owner of Burger King has pledged to eliminate deforestation from its supply chains by 2030 but scientists say the company is not moving fast enough to stop its hamburgers from destroying rainforests and the communities who depend on them. Restaurant Brands International, one of the world’s […] Read more

"If 80 per cent of the population wants it, whether it’s right or not, you almost have to do it.” – Paul Thoroughgood

The sustainability conundrum

In the Western world at least, there’s a big demand for ‘sustainably sourced’ products. What that means, or receiving a premium for them, is another matter

Reading Time: 5 minutes The food giants want it on their labels, and in the annual reports and other information they send to their investors. PepsiCo, Walmart, General Mills, McDonald’s, Unilever, Sara Lee and Nestlé are among those citing the years 2020 or 2025 as targets for achieving their goals of buying “sustainably sourced” products. But what does that […] Read more


(Dave Bedard photo)

Study finds organic’s sustainability ‘context-dependent’

Reading Time: 3 minutes When weighed for sustainability, the purported benefits and costs of organic agriculture can actually “vary heavily” from case to case, a new University of British Columbia study finds. The UBC study, titled “Many shades of gray: The context-dependent performance of organic agriculture,” published Friday in the U.S. journal Science Advances, sets out to “systematically review […] Read more

Follow the five per cent rule

Incremental changes can have a big impact on your operation

Reading Time: 4 minutes You may have heard the saying, “Take care of the small things and the big things take care of themselves.” This is a great piece of advice for life in general, and it also very much applies in the context of running a farm business, where even small changes can have a big impact on […] Read more


Ryan Boyd

The business of being young

Ryan Boyd believes regenerative agriculture is the right strategy to get him off the expansion treadmill

Reading Time: 5 minutes About 10 years ago, Ryan Boyd came to his father Jim with some new ideas, and Jim knew it was time to listen. Ryan talked about a new strategy, adopting regenerative and sustainable approaches in order to enhance their productivity. “Dad was more than willing to try something else,” Ryan says. “He’d always believed the […] Read more

The Canadian Field Print Calculator allows farmers to input information on practices related to land use efficiency, soil erosion risk, energy use, climate impact and soil carbon release.

The ‘sustainable’ agriculture advantage

Staking out the high ground in this debate could be good not just for the soil, but for bank accounts too

Reading Time: 4 minutes Is “sustainability” just another buzzword, or will it have a genuine impact on how farmers in Western Canada do business? Denis Trémorin, director for sustainability at Pulse Canada, believes there is substance behind “sustainability”— but it might not mean exactly what you think it means. Trémorin says sustainability is about operating in a socially, economically […] Read more


A McDonald’s restaurant in Toronto. (McDonalds.ca)

Consumers want sustainable beef, but defining that may be murky

Reading Time: 3 minutes CNS Canada –– McDonald’s plans on using sustainable beef by 2016, and intends on sourcing at least part of it from Canadian producers. The fast food giant’s latest step toward sustainability is to define what exactly that means. Defining sustainability is important, according to a beef brand officer, because in some cases it’s something consumers […] Read more

Woman in supermarket shopping groceries

Win the right battle – for the sake of food

Not only is the food we eat bad for us, but the practices that produced it are unsound too. Or so goes the message that too many consumers get too often from our mainstream media

Reading Time: 5 minutes The science is clear. “If you look at Western Canada and you look at a four-year crop rotation that starts anchored by a pulse crop at the front end, I believe that’s one of the most sustainable farming systems in the world,” says John Oliver, president of Maple Leaf Bio-Concepts. Many of the loudest, harshest […] Read more


Martin Entz sees opportunity for grain and livestock producers to work together on a more sustainable combination of annual and perennial crops.

Is momentum being lost for sustainable agriculture?

Farmers have made great strides toward sustainability, but there are fears that we’re starting to slip back

Reading Time: 5 minutes Have we become more sustainable?” asks Martin Entz, professor of natural systems agriculture at the University of Manitoba. “In some ways we’ve moved forward a long way, but there’s also some things we’ve moved backwards on.” Farmers have scored big wins in erosion control, the rate of organic matter loss, water use efficiency, weed management, […] Read more

man on arctic ice with sled

The business of Arctic char fishing in Nunavut

Even north of the Arctic Circle, the business of producing food is real business

Reading Time: 6 minutes When he lists the challenges of operating a business in Canada’s northern reaches, Stephane Lacasse, general manager of Kitikmeot Foods in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut mentions Mother Nature. Twice. It’s enough to make him sound like a farmer. That impression gets even stronger when he continues his list by saying that having a Plan B is […] Read more