Mary MacArthur

Jim Schroeder says he receives 35-50 e-mails a day from people around the world looking for Sunny Boy cereal. Recently, more than 2,000 people lined up at the company’s breakfast cereal plant to taste pancakes made from Sunny Boy’s new mix. Schroeder said response to the cereal, which is made from prairie wheat, rye and […] Read more

After a flurry of winter meetings to announce plans for packing plants to kill cull cattle, more than a dozen groups in Alberta are moving ahead, hoping to build a facility in their area. The stages range from doing a detailed feasibility study, to raising money, to starting engineering drawings for a plant, but none […] Read more

Members of an Alberta feeder association under investigation for 5,000 head of missing cattle worth $5 million have lost their $450,000 security deposit, said the provincial supervisor of Alberta’s feeder associations. “The association is insolvent and the association is proceeding with a wind-down. All the members will lose their security deposit,” said Brad Fournier of […] Read more

Kevin and Karen Boon had a different vision one year ago of how their ranch would look. They planned to increase their commercial cattle herd to about 120 head and be well on the road to a new Speckle Park breeding program. But May 20, 2003, the day Canada announced its first homegrown case of […] Read more

A private member’s bill to create a test market for wheat and barley in Alberta has been put on the shelf until fall, or possibly indefinitely. Calgary MLA Mark Hlady’s bill amending his previous test marketing bill introduced two years ago will be put on hold until the fall sitting of the legislature. “It’s first […] Read more

PICTURE BUTTE, Alta. – When prime minister Paul Martin announced a new aid program in Marchfor hard-hit beef producers, it was noaccident that he came to Picture Butte. Perhaps nowhere else have the direct impacts of BSE been as deeply felt. Almost half the 1.5 million head of feedlot space in Alberta surrounds Picture Butte. […] Read more

CALMAR, Alta. – Shirley and Wayne Forsberg insist that since a dairy cow diagnosed with BSE in Washington statewas traced to their Alberta farm, their life hasn’t changed. Like other farmers, they struggle to pay the bills with low-priced beef cattle and must deal with the mundane tasks of income tax deadlines and figuring out […] Read more

The RCMP is investigating the disappearance of 5,000 head of cattle worth $5 million from two central Alberta feeder associations. RCMP cpl. Ed Turco of the livestock investigation section is looking into the complaint of the missing animals from the Blindman Livestock Feeder Co-op of Rimbey and the Bluffton Breeders Co-op Ltd. of Bluffton. “We […] Read more

A member of the politically appointed group looking at how water is use to recover oil said rural Albertans still have time to sway the final report to the provincial government. Mary Griffiths, co-chair of the minister’s advisory committee on water use practice and policy, said she is disappointed with the draft report on the […] Read more

Cattle producers need to take a closer look at the amount of vitamin E in their animal livestock feed, says a beef specialist. New research shows most stored feed, such as hay, silage, greenfeed and swath grazing, doesn’t contain enough vitamin E to meet the animal’s nutritional requirements, said Barry Yaremcio, an Alberta Agriculture beef […] Read more