The new wheat, barley and oat varieties available to western farmers come with higher yield and improved disease resistance
There aren’t a lot of new cereal varieties coming to the western Canadian market in 2013, but many of the 10 wheat, barley and oat varieties being introduced have significant improvements in disease resistance and agronomic traits worth noting. Both Syngenta and Canterra have new Canada Prairie Spring (CPS) varieties available in 2013. Canterra’s AC […] Read moreTen new cereals for 2013
The plight of a barbershop drifter
My mother’s longtime friend Jean McKenzie always maintains, “there are only three days between a bad haircut and good haircut.” The point being, if you wait a couple days, any haircut will look good. Jean always has a nice easy to care for hairstyle, and I don’t get the impression she spends many hours stressing over […] Read more
Farmer Panel: CWB makes a good start out of the gate
The CWB program will no doubt need some adjustments over the coming months and years, but farmers like what they see so far
The new CWB may not be perfect, but Western Canadian farmers contacted for this Farmer Panel generally like what they see in the agency that becomes one more grain marketing company in a new open marketplace on August 1, 2012. As one farmer pointed out, the change that has taken place over the past year […] Read moreIs there another beef recall shoe to drop?
I hate to sound pessimistic, but there is just something about this XL Foods meat recall that reminds me of the 9/11 attacks on New York in 2001. I know the contaminated meat recall at XL wasn’t a terrorist attack, but I remember turning on TV in the early morning of September 11, 2001 and […] Read more
The feet of CFIA should be held to the fire over XL recall
I may have let the Canadian Food Inspection Agency off way too easy in my earlier comments about the schmozzle concerning the massive recall of beef from XL Foods at Brooks, Alta. And schmozzle isn’t even a good word as it suggests some comic mixup…and there is nothing comical about it. The shut down, which […] Read more
Is the meat recall gong show over?
If there is one thing we are learning about the XL Foods meat recall is how not to handle a wide-scale meat recall. To me it is a gong show. The first alarm was raised a month ago — September 4 — with a batch of meat testing positive for E.coli 0157:H7 and since then […] Read more
Silence isn’t golden when it comes to meat safety
I feel badly for XL Foods for this major meat recall. I am sure they never intend to produce products that may be suspect in making people sick. But they sure have dropped the ball from a PR standpoint when it comes to “dealing” with this latest and expanding alarm over a wide range of […] Read more
Hope I don’t end up smeared all over the Western “Seducer”
I just got back from a couple days of fishing with four guys from our company and four guys from Bayer Crop Science. We have done this before. I just hope none of those photos of me in what I thought were private, and yes perhaps compromising situations, ends up as some tawdry photo spread […] Read more
U.S. beef market is one giant bird in the hand
A Canadian ag/food policy group said this week the Canadian beef industry has to reduce its reliance on the U.S. market, but the point is if Canada doesn’t sell beef to the U.S. who else is going to buy it at that price. The message that the Canadian beef industry needs to reduce its reliance […] Read more
Hart Rat Control Program is the ace in the hole
I believe Alberta Agriculture and the city of Medicine Hat have so far handled this whole rat control and eradication project extremely well. I could say something snide like “they should now take their rat control model and apply it to Ottawa, or Washington or Wall Street”, but I won’t. That wouldn’t be kind. […] Read more
Cyber-Savvy Farmer
