There’s been lots of blather about exciting food and agriculture industry technological innovations. “Smart” everything has been talked about for more than a decade. My newspaper has published dozens of stories about the possibilities of blockchain. The “internet of things” is a term buzzing away at every farm and ag conference out there. But it’s […] Read more
Tag Archives Country: Canada
Will the COVID crisis cause a food revolution?
Innovative technologies are waiting on the shelf, but will they finally be embraced?
Don’t take farming and food for granted says U of C report
Canadians and Canada’s governments shouldn’t take farming and food for granted. That’s the bottom line of a June 9 report from the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy. “Food security in Canada is not something to be taken for granted and government policy action must reflect the essential service agriculture provides for our nation,” […] Read more
Don’t expect too much, no matter what happens with Meng
Whatever happens Wednesday, China will not be a market we can count on again
Tomorrow (Wednesday) a B.C. Supreme Court judge will release the ruling on whether or not to uphold the validity of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou’s arrest and detention on a U.S. extradition request. A lot of people are hoping Meng gets released, goes back to China, that China calms down, the two Michaels are released and […] Read more
Is North America’s food supply system a disaster or a success story?
Under the stress of COVID-19 both the flaws and resiliency of the Canadian and U.S. food systems have become popular topics
Is our food system a disaster? Widespread food shortages on grocery store shelves make some think so. In the early days of COVID-19, when I saw empty shelves for some dairy products, flour and toilet paper I got pretty spooked about food security. When I heard about packing plants becoming rife with virus, hundreds of […] Read more
Disputes with China accelerated and frozen by COVID-19
Where will Canadian farmers stand in a new Cold War?
In some ways the COVID-19 crisis has frozen Canada’s and other countries’ disputes with China, drawing everybody’s attention to the immediate needs of preserving national healthcare systems, protecting people’s health, and dealing with the devastating job losses and business failures provoked by the coronavirus. Just today the U.S. government announced that over 30 million U.S. […] Read more
Will the wild changes in the grocery, food and farming systems survive the pandemic?
What will create lasting changes and what is transitory?
The food, farming and grocery sectors have been shocked by the coronavirus crisis. Packing plants have been temporarily shuttered, creating crises on hog farms and cattle feedlots that can’t move animals they have no space for. Food products that everybody has taken for granted for decades, such as flour and yeast, have become suddenly scarce, […] Read more
Cargill closes High River beef plant
The Cargill meat processing plant in High River, Alta., which slaughters 40 percent of the cattle in Canada, announced temporary closure effective April 20. Date of reopening is unknown but the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association said it could mean industry losses of half a billion dollars by June if the closure lasts that long. Halt of […] Read more
Are crops and meat Canada’s best soft power tools?
An agricultural think tank thinks they could be
Are you hoarding toilet paper? How about white flour? Cheese? From trips to my local supermarket and posts on my social media accounts, it seems like lots of people are. If you were planning to spend this month baking bread and using a lot of toilet paper and haven’t already stocked up, forget about it. […] Read more
A deliberate and unhurried hand at the agricultural policy tiller
Marie-Claude Bibeau isn't likely to shy away from tough areas, or be rushed into "fixing" them
Federal Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau isn’t scare of talking about agricultural policy. That’s a good thing, because one thing any Canadian Agriculture Minister must be willing to do is talk about ag policy. And talk and talk and talk. Everybody wants to talk to whoever the ag minister is, and in the agriculture industry that […] Read more
Newspaper journalism has faced a digital tsunami
The internet and social media are cool, but the right-side/wrong-side journalism it has created are a curse
When I showed up at The Western Producer in November 1994 I was handed a Macintosh laptop and shown how the company email system worked. That was pretty cool. Instead of being shackled to a boxy desktop computer, I could take my sleek laptop wherever I was reporting from, plug into a phone line and […] Read more
