General

Gill Shaw has been re-appointed to another three years as chair of the board of directors for the Farm Credit Corporation, Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz announced Friday.   “Mr. Shaw has been doing an excellent job as Chair of FCC’s Board of Directors since 2006, and I am pleased he has agreed to stay on […] Read more

A new suite of national agricultural programs is now available to the agriculture sector in the Northwest Territories.  Federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz and Robert McLeod, minister of industry, tourism and investment, announced the details of new NWT agricultural programs under the Growing Forward framework today.  This announcement follows the signing of the Growing Forward […] Read more

A perennial complaint from the farm community has always been that urbanites think their food comes from a grocery store – but what would happen if a city didn’t have a single major grocery store? In Detroit, the decaying buckle on the U.S. midwest’s Rust Belt, citizens are struggling with exactly that problem, CNN reports. […] Read more

The Boston Globe is reporting that small farms catering to the local market so far seem to be largely immune from the effects of the economic crisis and great recession. Despite consumers generally tightening their belts, the Massachusetts  Department of Agriculture Resources says growing demand for farmers markets and other local food programs. Staff at […] Read more

The Wall Street Journal reports that U.S. farmland is following the rest of the real estate market by posting the first declines since 1987. The Journal reports that U.S. farmland fell to an average of $2,100 an acre, down 3.2 per cent from a year earlier, according to a report by the USDA. The report […] Read more

Your kids may be priceless, but they certainly don’t come cheap.  The pricetag on raising a child born in 2008 to adulthood will set you back US$291,570, the  U.S. Department of Agriculture says. And that doesn’t include college. The figure, which amounts to just under C$312,000 at current exchange rates, covers food, shelter and other […] Read more

Maple Leaf Foods is recalling nine wiener products produced under the Hygrade, Shopsy’s and Maple Leaf brands at its plant in Hamilton, Ontario, due to the possibility that they may contain traces of listeria monocytogenes. “This is a precautionary measure only,” the company says in a release. “The company is 100 per cent in compliance […] Read more

The U.S. based Organic Consumers Association has denounced a July 28th report from Britain’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) as “faulty and misleading.” The FSA report alleges that there is no substantial difference in nutritional content between organic and conventional food. The report, however, ignores the well-documented health and environmental benefits of organic food and farming, […] Read more

  The Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal is reporting a crisis in Wisconsin’s dairy industry that it’s linking to the ongoing meltdown in the U.S. and global economies. The story says the industry is losing about $4 million a day, or $100 a cow each month: “That’s largely because farmers, who received about $20 for every hundred pounds […] Read more

  Equity markets made some solid gains today as inflation talk is starting to heat up which helped to start things off with an upward push.  This helped to spur grains upward, as there seems to be a bullish momentum building in the grains right now with technical indicators pointing the way. The U.S. dollar […] Read more