A healthcare worker tests people for COVID-19 at a Calgary Rural Primary Care Testing Centre drive-through location at the High River, Alta., Culture Centre. The town is home to Cargill's beef packing facility in Alberta. |  Mike Sturk photo

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

Lots changes, but much remains the same, in both farming and journalism

In 25 years of reporting on farming, everything seems both different and the same

How do you find a farmer? Finding farmers and getting their views has always been a core part of my job. It wasn’t easy to do 25 years ago, when the internet was a just-beginning thing, almost nobody had a mobile phone and most farmers lived far from the cities I was living in. Fortunately, […] Read more


Supporters watch the results come in at the Conservative leader Andrew Scheer's campaign headquarters during the federal election in Regina.  |  REUTERS/Carlos Osorio

Life in the afterglow of the commodity boom: Is this why we’re all so mad and raging?

Everybody wants somebody to blame. Better blame Mr CommoditiesCycle

It’s a truly dark time in Canada, with the rise of an angry, raging, denunciatory politics taking over this nation the way that it has been doing in the U.S. for a few years now. The federal election supplied ample evidence of this, with ill will and personal attacks hanging over the entire campaign. Beyond […] Read more