Keith Dryden

Hail and farewell The year 2000 has arrived and so I have decided to fold up The Fringe and bid you all a fond farewell. The editors of The Western Producer have been most tolerant of my random vaporings but the time has come to leave the stage to the highly competent present generation. This […] Read more

Water bearers with running shoes In 2000 the Trans-Canada Trail organization will ask walkers and runners from this country’s perimeter to carry ocean water to Hull, Que. They don’t need water in Hull, having a number of rivers and streams in that area. The idea is to illustrate the expanse of Canada by bringing together […] Read more

The future face of agriculture A farmer friend recently suggested to me that the way things are going, corporations will soon own and operate all the farmland as well as marketing its produce. I can’t see it happening. Farmers today have access to the best of equipment and technological know-how. They work non-union hours and […] Read more

Demonstrations with a byte When the World Trade Organization attempted to begin its negotiating sessions in Seattle late last year, it was considerably hampered by street demonstrations. Apparently the internet was the key to the massiveness of this gathering of anti-free trade factions. By going on-line, persons with a certain point of view are put […] Read more

Calder’s noisy industry Puffed wheat making must have been a major industry on the Prairies in the 1930s and 1940s. So far I’ve heard of manufacturing plants at Yorkton, Calder, Melfort and Keatley in Saskatchewan and Portage la Prairie in Manitoba. I talked to Peter Brigidear, whose brother, Philip, operated the Calder plant from 1939 […] Read more

We’re just suckers for a good time When are we going to admit that Canada’s trade negotiators have been sold a bill of goods? In describing Canadians in a fishly sense, they are suckers for a good line. In the Uruguay trade negotiations much was made by the United States of the need for free […] Read more

The biggest dinosaur Down in Oklahoma they have discovered the remains of a dinosaur that weighed an estimated 60 tonnes and stood 18 metres high. It lived about 110 million years ago so you can’t use it to scare your kids at bedtime. That animal would have been several times bigger than Henry Janzen’s new […] Read more

Powering your combine A year or 10 ago, whilst visiting in California, we were shown two electric cars that were designed to replace internal combustion automobiles and the smog they caused. These electrics didn’t look too comfortable and they only had room for a driver and one passenger. Maximum speed at that time was 35 […] Read more

Farm use gives different scope to guns issue Ownership and the use of guns has become an issue that won’t go away. There are those who believe if guns were banned, murders, holdups and other criminal use of firearms would cease. If only it were that simple. I was born on a farm, the son […] Read more

The latest target of the politically correct viewers with alarm is the genetically altered food product. They claim, and rightly so, that we don’t know the effect of this food product on humans and other mammals 20 years down the road. Will moving a gene from a chicken to a carrot cause us carrot consumers […] Read more