Michael Raine

REGINA – International business at Canadian Western Agribition remains strong despite the underlying presence of the BSE crisis. Stewart Stone of Heartland Livestock, the show’s international chair, said the bovine spongiform encephalopathy border closures and trade disruptions appear to have had little effect on foreign buyers or their interest in Canadian livestock. “Numbers (of foreign […] Read more

REGINA – The Heartland First Lady Classic, the Beef Supreme Challenge, the beef carcass competition, the Cinderella Classic, Agribition Pen-Arama – these multi-breed cattle events continue to attract crowds and entries at purebred cattle shows across North America. “Excitement. It is exciting. It is unpredictable. It pits our best of breed against theirs,” said Karen […] Read more

REGINA – Consolidation in Canadian agriculture has caused an industry that once relied on seat-of-the-pants decisions based on experience and luck to turn to advanced management strategies to prosper. “We now manage our luck,” said Dave Plett, president and chief executive officer of Western Feedlots Ltd. of Alberta. Plett was speaking to a business strategies […] Read more

REGINA – While no one has said “Go west, young heifer,” that could well apply to some of Canada’s best purebred cattle from the central and eastern provinces. In any other November, many purebred producers from Ontario and Quebec would be in Louisville, Kentucky, showing their cattle at the North American International Livestock Exposition rather […] Read more

Three of Canada’s largest fast food retailers say they are remaining patriotic in their beef use, at least for now. McDonald’s says it will buy and serve all-Canadian beef in its restaurants until such time “as the (BSE) crisis is over.” It moved to an all-Canadian content “in support of the Canadian industry and will […] Read more

Animal traceability for the hog industry will occur within the next three years and producers need to plan for it and be involved in its design, says the general manager of Sask Pork. Neil Ketilson told the Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium that if producers don’t become involved in determining how the animal identification and tracing […] Read more

LANIGAN, Sask. – Keeping the older cow and selling the heifer as a feeder may be the best plan for 2003, but careful planning is necessary if it is going to be profitable. Producers across Canada would normally have expected to receive good money for their cull cows this fall as they fed a strong […] Read more

As the hog industry’s reliance on artificial insemination increases, producers need to pay more attention to details. A decade ago only five percent of hog producers in North America inseminated their sows and gilts artificially. Today it is 65 percent and the number rises each year. With more than 25 million doses of semen being […] Read more

Despite the troubles caused by BSE, and maybe in part because of them, the 2003 Canadian Western Agribition may be more successful than ever. As one of the world’s largest cattle events, Agribition might well have fallen victim to bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Border closures, nervous international markets, bad publicity and producer losses in the hundreds […] Read more

LANIGAN, Sask. – Backgrounding newly weaned calves on swath-grazed Golden German millet produced better daily gains than feedlot weaning in a research study that ended for the season last week. At the Termuende Research Farm near Lanigan, Sask., Bart Lardner of the Western Beef Development Centre and his colleagues found that the variety of foxtail […] Read more