In late December every year, we deliver a special edition of this newspaper for year-end reading, with the stories also posted on producer.com.
It’s different from your regular Western Producer because it lacks the usual Markets, Farm Living, Production, Business and Livestock sections, as well as the weekly charts and graphs of commodity pricing.
We do this to accommodate Christmas press operations and Canada Post’s delivery schedules around the holidays.
What you get in this year-end Western Producer is a Christmas-dinner-sized helping of feature stories from our talented journalists and designers. We began planning this edition in April when a topic was chosen.
Read Also
Downturn in grain farm economics threatens to be long term
We might look back at this fall as the turning point in grain farm economics — the point where making money became really difficult.
Innovation on the farm is key to whatever we write for any issue these days. With all the dramatic changes underway in agriculture and food, our team of senior managers decided that planning for the immediate future should be the focus. It was refined to future-proofing the farm and we call it Farming Forward.
This issue has case-study style features on how to plan for the next generations as they step into agriculture and as some older generations step out, or at least head toward the door. Some of those stories are about tough-to-consider subjects, but ones that every farmer should ponder.
Major investments on the farm are analyzed in stories about farm machinery and technology choices. (Hint: not many of these are easy either.)
We also look at the latest technologies that seem to be suddenly on our driveways and the ongoing challenge of labour shortages that affect the immediate futures of agricultural operations.
There are stories about farming choices that aren’t obvious opportunities at first glance. And yes, there is a weather story because that is one element of constant change on the Prairies and no edition of The Western Producer would be complete without it.
The content of a regular edition is all here, with one exception — immediate news. The nature of a newspaper is to provide it and, in this case, we provide the “new” part of “news” but not the ‘breaking’ part.
As I write this just before Christmas, South Korea has stopped imports of Alberta beef due to an atypical case of BSE and the federal agriculture minister got her marching orders from the prime minister, including a move to ban live horse exports, improve farm labour issues and improve agriculture’s carbon footprint. Ottawa has announced some assistance for Prince Edward Island potato growers.
Inside Glacier FarmMedia’s digital workhouse, we were working on a year-in-review panel discussion about technology and equipment for the Between the Rows podcast and a multi-media feature about cyber-security on the farm that will appear in January.
So, if you are looking for the latest farm news, you will find it on producer.com, your online source of the Producer since 1995.
Best of the season from our place to your place.
– Mike Raine, editor
