Some things have never and probably will never change in Western Canadian agriculture. Number One of those things is farmers’ and grain companies’ constant and chronic complaints of poor and unreliable rail transportation. From 26 years of working at this newspaper, I’m pretty confident stating that grain transportation has been farmers’ biggest problem of the […] Read more
Tag Archives Blog
How much has Western Canadian grain transportation changed in 25 years? A lot, and not at all
Ag markets trends for 2021: What do we need to watch?
After the jolting shocks of 2020, who knows what the world is going to throw at farmers and agriculture markets in 2021? I took a little look at that in my last column of 2020, in the December 24 edition, which you can see here. (My editors appear to be indulging their senses of humour […] Read more
2020: The year food mattered
Farmers often complain about the way people living in cities seem to take our high-quality, high-safety food system for granted. Nobody in Canada worries about starving. Malnourishment is generally the result of bad diet choices, poverty or social dysfunctions, not an inability to find or obtain enough food to survive and be healthy. Why worry […] Read more
Everybody’s getting resilient – but what does that really mean?
These days everything is getting referred to as resilient. Canada’s food system is being described as being “resilient” for having faced the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic and failing to break, although it seemed like it might buckle for a while. After initially running short on flour, toilet paper and a range of products, there […] Read more
BLOG: Sustainable ag is here to stay
ESG investing. It may not be a household phrase yet, but it’s already shaping the future of agriculture. And in five to 10 years, Canadian producers may be operating their farms differently because of ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing. In the last 11 months, I probably received 150 emails from dozens of agriculture and […] Read more
Canada can’t ever go back, and that’s just something Canadians will have to accept
“You can’t ever go back.” That was the theme of a conversation I had with one of my daughters on the weekend. There was no specific place we were talking about, just the idea that the places that we have lived and been no longer really exist once we’ve left them, because every “place” is […] Read more
Consumers are cheap, but they’re willing to eat local foods – if it’s easy
Consumers want to buy locally-produced food – but for most people it has to be cheap and easy to find. It has to be really easy to find. And as cheap as non-local food. Those, to me, are the most apparent insights from a major survey of consumers recently conducted by Sylvain Charlebois and colleagues […] Read more
Percy and me
This isn’t a post about Percy Schmeiser, the real-life Bruno, Sask. farmer, and me, the Western Producer reporter. This is about Percy the Myth, now of Hollywood movie fame (played by Christopher Walken,) and me, the Western Producer reporter. I’ve never much engaged with the mythology of Percy, who became a cause celebre for anti-genetically […] Read more
BLOG: We export rocks to Europe, they sell us Audis
The benefits of Canada’s free trade deal with the European Union can be summed up like this: we’re selling Europe more oil and minerals, they’re selling us more BMWs, pharmaceutical drugs and high-tech machinery. In an optimistic document released in June, the federal government touted the economic benefits of the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade […] Read more
Say goodbye to Silly Season and hello to Serious Season
We’re reduced to this: arguing about whether or not Adele should have worn a Jamaican-themed outfit to a London Caribbean festival and getting worked up about some young radicals in Montreal pulling down and beheading a much-ignored statue of John A Macdonald. This is a good way for Silly Season to depart. (Silly Season is […] Read more
