Blog

I’ve always considered engineers to be the rock stars of the machinery world. They’re the ones who take the concepts discovered by Newton, Tesla and others and actually turn them into useable technology. Some, or maybe most, of that technology today is beyond impressive. Over the years I’ve had the privilege of meeting and talking […] Read more

As I and a handful of other journalists had a casual conversation with some senior executives from one of the international machinery brands recently, it was interesting to hear about the intricacies of managing production facilities in a variety of countries around the world. Their firm has plants in the UK, the U.S., India, China […] Read more

The news coming from the major equipment brands in February strongly suggests the equipment market in 2015 is shaping up to be very different than the one we’ve experienced in the past five years. The sales outlook for new equipment this year isn’t all that rosy. In a speech to investors at a February shareholders […] Read more

It happened to me again last week. I was in the Midwestern U.S. and a complete stranger offered me the kind of hospitality usually reserved for a friend. After a day full of flight delays caused by everything from weather to the lack of an available gate for my plane to pull up to and […] Read more

A couple of weeks ago I decided that some of the machines kicking around the farmyard had been here far too long. If left as they were long enough, they’d eventually degrade into big brown piles of rust. There’s no profit in that. So I sat down at the computer and posted some online ads […] Read more

In an article published in the current issue of Country Guide, Grainews’ sister publication, Lois Harris reported on the results of a survey conducted to gauge the public’s perception of Canadian agriculture. The survey she cited was commissioned by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), and it found that “consumers really don’t know much about agriculture”. […] Read more

I’m not sure how many farm shows and machinery events I’ve been at in the last five years, certainly a lot. And they’ve been spread over a pretty wide geographic area, across North America and in Europe. There are also a few shows I haven’t been able to get to that are still on my […] Read more

Last week I was one of the guest speakers at the Selkirk Grain Information Day just outside of Winnipeg. Manitoba’s provincial agriculture department puts this event on each January, and I’ve spoken there several times on machinery topics. Aside from imparting any wisdom—or reasonable facsimile thereof—to those who chose to show up and listen to […] Read more