I’m likely one of the few women who are positively giddy for November. Because November is Movember and I’m a huge fan of fantastic iterations of facial hair. The whole awareness campaign behind Movember is just icing on the cake (moustache?). I’ve encouraged the boy half of RealAgriculture.com to participate, but he hasn’t agreed. Could… Read More

It’s that time of year again, when a student’s thoughts turn to looking fashionable while still staying warm (hahahahaha, as if) and, more importantly, the students from the University of Guelph’s Crop 4240 class launch their weed identification and control videos. This is the second year that instructor Francois Tardif and lab lead Mike Cowbrough… Read More

Modernizing Canada’s varietal registration system needed to happen — the removal of kernel visual distinguishability and the CWB’s monopoly in recent years has changed crop variety development in Canada. The registration system needs to evolve with it in order to stay current and competitive. Read More: Upov 91, Gerry Rits and Canada’s variety registration system… Read More

Sometimes, as a writer, when you get weary of coming up with new ideas, you simply take an older, successful idea and recycle it. Two examples of this: tabloids running a “Celebrity Pregnancy Shocker” piece and W5 running a “factory farming animal abuse” story filmed entirely by undercover animal activists. And so this last week,… Read More

Some people used to think farmers only could grow crops for food. Today, though, some think farmers only should grow crops for food. It’s a great debate, with, I suspect, the answer somewhere in the middle. Philosophical, theoretical, economic and even spiritual debates rage about farmers’ role in feeding the world versus growing crops for… Read More

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” While this business principle seems to apply more to hard numbers and bushels per acre, it applies just as perfectly to rangeland production. Beyond just grass tonnage or pounds of growth per acre, there are several other outputs of rangeland production that should be assessed, measured… Read More

This blog post is one I was hoping not to have to write. In Canada, there was recently an “investigative report” on the commercial egg industry. It developed after an animal activist group took undercover footage and passed an edited video to a television newsmagazine. The resulting 30 minute show was a black eye to… Read More

Whenever the holiday falls on a Monday, the rest of the week feels a little off. Case in point, I thought Thursday was Friday even though it was a short week and started this “last day of the work week” column a day early. What gives? Anywho, as the RealAgriculture team struggled into their post-turkey… Read More

Research is often seen as an investment in new technology development, in whirring instruments or the roar of equipment. That might make it easy to forget that new technology results from new knowledge. And knowledge is key to preserving and advancing modern family farms. That reminder comes courtesy of Mildmay, ON dairy farmer Ralph Dietrich. He’s the… Read More

 

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