One of the lessons of the pandemic and response to it by governments and regulatory agencies is that regulatory agility is possible. COVID-19 vaccines have been approved with record speed, and from what I can find, the government says that the same vigour of process has also been applied. The only point missing is long-term […] Read more
Author Archives
Looking back at what we learned, lost and gained in 2020
I’m not big on end-of-year summaries, but with 2020 a year whose end will be celebrated (albeit not with crowds), it’s worth looking at what we’ve learned, what we’ve lost and what we’ve gained. This will be a year that historians and average people will look back on for the next 100 years. Hopefully we […] Read more
CFIA eases meat trade between provinces
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency will allow interprovincial trade of provincially inspected meat if necessary to alleviate meat shortages. Moving meat not inspected by the federal system across a provincial border will require a ministerial exemption. A process to obtain that was released late last month. The process is temporary, in place during the COVID-19 […] Read more
Analyst sees aura of stagnation around productivity
Agriculture has been the productivity star of the Canadian economy for the past 50 years, says John Stackhouse of the Royal Bank. But he also says that predictable productivity improvement seen almost every year is flagging and he’s not sure why. He told the Ontario Federation of Agriculture’s annual meeting that for agriculture to become […] Read more
We need to export agriculture’s productivity miracle
Global productivity in agriculture production continues to grow healthily, but not yet fast enough to feed the expected 10 billion people on the planet by 2050. That’s according to the 2019 Global Agriculture Productivity (GAP) Report, recently released by Virginia Tech’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The report says that agriculture productivity is increasing at an average […] Read more
Opportunities abound for improving food exports to EU
There are opportunities in Europe for Canadian agriculture and food products, but we have to learn to play their game. I recently spent a couple weeks in Europe visiting relatives and travelling with family. In Great Britain, the cradle of the local food movement I noticed that the need to label everything as British is […] Read more
Agriculture adopts digital technology faster than other sectors
Is agriculture ahead or behind the rest of the economy on the technology curve? I’ve always said ahead, but those who monitor these sorts of things from outside the industry always rank agriculture as a “mature” or “legacy” sector that lags other sectors in technology adoption. The answer is likely somewhere in the middle — […] Read more
Speed up availability of high-speed internet in rural areas
My fist-pump moment when we were deciding whether to buy our small farm 10 years ago had nothing to do with the state of the house, or soil conditions, or proximity to off-farm work. I was standing on the second floor of the derelict house on the property and I could see the elevator leg […] Read more
Low milk prices prompt U.S. dairy to eye supply management
You can tell every five to 10 years that the American milk situation is getting particularly dire — when they start having discussions about supply management. Dairy farms in the United States are in their fifth year of chronically low milk prices, which declined quickly in late 2014 from about $25 per hundredweight of milk […] Read more
Higher farm incomes are definitely something to celebrate
Statistics Canada says that farm households are doing much better than they did a generation or two ago. That’s something to celebrate. Median farm income was almost half of the income of the rest of the population in the early 1970s. As of 2016, it was 20 percent above the median income of the rest […] Read more
