Reading Time: 4 minutes The soil has its own perspective, says soil scientist Mario Tenuta, which explains why in Western Canada, where intensive farming has “only” been going on for 100 years, our soils are actually still young. “Our soils are not mature, compared to places like Europe or Africa,” Tenuta says. Over the last 50 years of farming, […] Read more
Foraging for better soils
If you aren’t growing forages, can you really say you’re farming sustainably?
WGRF research offers faster herbicide testing
WGRF-funded research offers a rapid test to determine whether your weed escapes are Group-2 herbicide resistant
Reading Time: 4 minutes You sprayed 10 days ago and yet that patch of wild oats is still thriving. So you do what farmers across the Prairies do in this situation: take a sample and send it in to the Crop Protection Lab (CPL) in Regina and wait. Depending on the problem, some answers come in just a few […] Read more
Red pens come out for postmortem report on CWB era
Reading Time: 2 minutes A researcher working for a group calling for the return of single desk marketing misinterpreted data in former Canadian Wheat Board annual reports to conclude the board paid lower rates for shipping grain. Several sources, including a former Canadian Wheat Board director, say University of Saskatchewan Ph.D. candidate Laura Larsen used an inaccurate comparison in […] Read more
Inspired to make a difference
They’re growing the kids that are going to defeat world hunger
Reading Time: 6 minutes Let’s just say that for these four Canadian high school students, the act of sitting on the floor and dipping their hands into a communal bowl of rice shared with 75 other people was an uncomfortable experience. Yet this way of eating is routine for millions of the world’s poor. “I only had to go […] Read more
The fine balance of controlling crop diseases
It's a classic example of where short-term decisions can mean long-term problems
Reading Time: 7 minutes Randy Kutcher recalls that when he moved to Saskatchewan 25 years ago, farmers were using hardly any fungicide. “They were using a bit of fungicide for sclerotinia in canola, and that’s about it. Now it’s pretty much part of the program, and often crops are getting two or more applications, and it’s almost become like […] Read more
The long-term battle of fighting crop diseases
Fighting crop disease isn’t a single-season job — you’ve got to be in it for the long haul and protect and maintain the capacity to do the work
Reading Time: 7 minutes In the winter of 1820, farmers at the embryonic Red River Settlement, at what is now Winnipeg, faced disaster after their seed grain was destroyed. The colony had dabbled in wheat production for the previous few years, but with little success. It was make-or-break time for the cold-hardened and dispossessed Scotsmen who had migrated via […] Read more
Canada’s agricultural research deficit
Public ag research in Canada gets cut again and again, all while proof grows that science is needed more than ever
Reading Time: 9 minutes Get public research right and the results can be impressive, whether the benefit is incremental, like the new crop varieties that, year after year, edge farm productivity up, or if it’s transformative like the invention of canola or the equally ground-shifting release of early genetics that saw corn and soybeans to sweep the East and […] Read more
Rye takes an innovation jump
Hybrid varieties and new specialty markets are breathing new life into what had become the poor cousin of the Prairie cereal family
Reading Time: 5 minutes Some new varieties and new markets may signal the end of a long decline in Western Canada’s rye production. The 1990s started with rye area pushing the 1.3-million-acre mark, yet this year only 220,000 acres went into the ground. But some of those acres were planted with new hybrid varieties that have produced some eye-popping […] Read more
Forage breeding faces funding challenges
Government has cut back, private companies are not keen on crops that don’t need to be reseeded every year, and you can’t check off sales to farmers’ own livestock
Reading Time: 3 minutes Forages are Canada’s biggest crop but you wouldn’t know it because of the few resources that go into breeding them. You’d think that, given its size, forage would be a giant in the world of plant breeding. Unfortunately, it’s more of a midget. Canada has only four major publicly funded programs for breeding tame forages, […] Read more
The 5 per cent solution of farm management
On the Hebert farm, the momentum for growth is internal
Reading Time: 7 minutes In Saskatoon in mid-January, Kristjan Hebert was at the podium of a banquet room, telling the crowd of farmers something that farmers have said all through the generations. Hebert and his family want to build a legacy farm. “And our definition of legacy is extremely simple,” Hebert continued. “We want to leave the land and […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
