We’ve been building up our agronomic muscle at The Western Producer.
We pride ourselves in providing great and timely farm production information, but we have also been increasing our coverage with some of the best agricultural extension professionals we could find.
At one time we had a wider variety than we have today. Many years ago we had food and fashion columnists, published book reviews and covered sports and bridge. With your advice, we have kept the food column, and we hope it has changed with the times to meet your needs.
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We invest regularly in scientific reader polling and take the advice of our seasoned staff while setting priorities about coverage. Some of that advice was for more information about production agriculture and agronomy. We report on this every week, but we have also been working in recent years to add more industry professional voices to our choir.
I am a big fan of extension agronomy, no secret there. Delivering agricultural science and research in the form of practical, working knowledge to producers remains vitally important, even as governments of all stripes abandon investment in this critical step in food production.
Many of our columnists are excellent at this, including our veterinarians and accountants (to me that is a science, too).
Our most recent additions include Terry Brase’s Precision Happens about precision agriculture from the guy who wrote the book on it, Will Oddie’s Energy Field about making the most of rural energy investment, Thom Weir’s Precisely Agronomy, which offers some of the best crop production advice in the West, and Organic Matters with Brenda Frick, who tackles the prairie organic industry.
This week we have added Spray Matters.
For prairie farmers, this aspect of agriculture has grown and become more critical to protecting yield, quality, the environment, Canada’s export reputation and ultimately the financial sustainability of farms.
Well-known spraying systems researchers Tom Wolf from Sask-atchewan and Jason Deveau from Ontario are collaborating on our newest column and a new website at www.sprayer101.com.
They bring decades of experience and passion for their profession.
You can find their new column on page 62 this week.
michael.raine@producer.com
