Sandecki is a columnist in Terrace, B.C. This item originally appeared in the Terrace Standard. If you’ve put off writing a will for fear it might shorten your life, quit worrying and consult a lawyer. Don’t procrastinate. No matter what age or how healthy you are, you should always have a will that is up […] Read more
Opinion
A will tells your family that you love them – Opinion
Letters to the editor
Lentil price; CAIS statistic; Power lines; Farrier rules; No mediocrity; Supporting trade Lentil price In response to Sandra Yonge’s letter on lentil prices (Open Forum, May 28), I would like to provide our side of the story. When the Yonges delivered their contracted load of laird lentils to All Commodities, we advised them immediately it […] Read more
Farmers must learn to calculate cost of production – Perspectives on Management
The idea of cost of production is certainly nothing new to farmers. However, given the price cycles of inventory and inputs recently, there seems to be increased interest about cost of production in the industry. Helping farmers gain a better understanding of what their cost of production is and how it should factor into management […] Read more
Monday June 8, 2009
Flying over the farmland towards Edmonton last Thursday I said to Robert, “there’s something wrong down there.” It’s not because we’ve just come from Switzerland where the canola pods are leaning heavily, and the first barley is already starting to turn colour. After all, we know those are winter crops. No, it’s more than that. […] Read more
Out of the blue…
I’m hanging in the air – literally, somewhere over the far northeast of Canada. Figuratively I hang between my three worlds – Zambia, Switzerland, and Alberta. When we first got back to Switzerland people often asked me: ‘Bisch scho aacho?” (dialect for – have you arrived?) What they’re really asking is: “has your spirit arrived, […] Read more
USDA
The smartguy chatter so far is that today’s S and D reports are bullish for soybeans (good for canola), neutral for corn (and feedgrains) and bearish for wheat. Too bad about the wheat conclusion.
Huge . . . tracts of land
On Friday afternoon and Saturday I drove across huge tracts of land, all the way from Des Moines, Iowa to the northern plains, across southern Minnesota and through eastern South Dakota and North Dakota on the way back from the World Pork Expo. It was a great way to get a sense of the real […] Read more
Strong crops, weak meat
The slumping pork market has been lying under the World Pork Expo like a lot of slippery dung, upending most attendees’ hopes to find some way to look at the next year with confidence. Most people’s assumption has been that the pork market’s weakness last year would end this year, and hopes were raised when […] Read more
WAIT A MINUTE!
Hey, I wrongly badmouthed the NPPC folks earlier today. They, of course, as I reported a number of times, were one of the few U.S. farm organizations that actually argued against mandatory COOL, and that got them into trouble with some of their members. What my faulty memory was recalling was some of the other […] Read more
Dirty big secret
I always find it a little hallucinatory to be in the United States, where some ordinary things seem backwards. For instance, their ludicrous use of the word “patriot” for the traitors who rebelled in 1776, took up weapons against their government and persecuted the loyalists, whom they refer to as “traitors.” This was said in a […] Read more
