May 17, 2012

Richard Phillips: Making Your Voice Heard By Government is Critical For Farmers

Richard Phillips

There are many farmers and many Canadians, that if you asked “Do you feel that government hears your voice as a farmer?”, would launch into a frustrated and angry tirade about any number of issues under their skin. In some cases that’s a legitimate expression of a system that failed them, but in a greater [...]

Ron Bonnett – The Difficulty in Adopting a National Food Strategy

Ron Bonnett

Adopting a national food strategy is no small task. The development of that strategy involves a number of complex issues that have to be identified by importance and then integrated together into a sustainable strategy supported by government policy and a diverse demographic. Simple, huh? There’s a reason it’s taken so long. With all that [...]

John Masswohl Discusses Future of COOL

john masswohl

The World Trade Organization’s ruling on the country of origin labelling (COOL) legislation brought some small sense of victory to the Canadian beef industry. The excitement over that victory was short-lived however as producers realized that any tangible results stemming from that ruling would be a long way off. The potential for an appeal by [...]

Creating a Stronger Voice for Alberta’s Wheat Producers

wheat field

by Kent Erickson and Lynn Jacobson In the past 150 years, wheat has played a significant role in the settlement of the Canadian prairies and the development of Western Canadian agriculture. Canada became the “bread basket of the world” because of the quality and quantity of wheat it supplied to countries around the globe. In [...]

Bill Donald Talks About His Term as NCBA President and Canada / US Trade Relations

truck feeding cattle

With over 200 days of travel as the President of NCBA, Bill Donald has been busy.  Donald has reign at the top of NCBA at a time that has been very good for Canada / United States trade relations.   With Canada shipping fat cattle south and Canada purchasing one billion dollars of US beef [...]

FarmTech 2012 – Gerry Ritz – The Realities of an Open Market for Wheat and Barley

Gerry Ritz FarmTech

Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz was in attendance at FarmTech in Edmonton.  He spoke to the 1600 attendees about the huge aoportunities in Canadian agriculture.  Of course of one the topics was the upcoming changes to the marketing sytsem for wheat and barley coming August 1, 2012 in Western Canada. There were a number of questions put [...]

South Korea Lifts Ban on Canadian Cattle Imports

South-Korean-flag

The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association released information this morning that South Korea has lifted its ban on Canadian Beef imports.  This news is long overdue and we have to realize that trade resumption doesn’t happen overnight. Learning from our agreement with China, Canada must complete all of the more detailed technical issues as quickly as possible [...]

The OFA Asks the Government to Suspend Wind Turbine Development in Ontario

wind turbines

Green energy has been a huge push in Ontario agriculture through the development of solar and wind power infrastructure.  The solar power subsidization by the McGuinty government has been at the very least controversial at times and now the wind turbine projects has created some stir within the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.  The OFA has [...]

Australia’s Experience in Having Wheat Marketing Choice – Geoff Honey

Geoff Honey

Farmers in Western Canada will be going through a big change come August. The end of the Canadian Wheat Board’s single desk will open up a whole new landscape to producers. It’s a landscape that some farmers are unsure about and other farmers are excited for. For those who land on the unsure side of [...]

Is Canada Prepared for Massive Amounts of Farmer Retirements?

Harvest combine

Christie Young is the Executive Director of FarmSmart and this week she has created some stir within the Canadian Agriculture industry by saying that our industry is not prepared for the coming mass farmer retirements.  What has really caused the stir is her statement that the government has some sort of responsibility to ensure we prepare [...]