Life in a rural neighbourhood has been taking a beating in literary circles for about 200 years. Legions of writers, starting with Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, have been working stead... Read more
Antibiotic resistance is killing over 700,000 people a year, experts state. In 2000, there was a zero percentage of children in the world with antibiotic resistance. Three years ago it was 5... Read more
Lameness is one of the most common health problems in dairy cows. It is also a welfare concern for individual cows and for the entire dairy industry. Some causes of lameness like digital der... Read more
Like most farmers, I was watching for the May USDA Report, hoping that U.S. government analysts would reveal something new that would kick start the wheat market. They came up empty-handed.... Read more
Earlier this year, I wrote about the findings of a research report on Canadian dairy farmers who had switched to robot milkers. The research was published in the Journal of Dairy Science. Th... Read more
A few times a year, someone in the anti-tree cutting groups raises their voice and bombards papers with letters to the editor as bush land next to or near their property is cut down and the... Read more
Canada’s 2017 federal budget failed to offer any plans for deregulation. This is ironic because regulations are among the most important obstacles to innovation, the holy grail of the govern... Read more
You’d wonder, really, how it came to this. Dairy farmers sitting on county milk committees from across the province, congregated in March for three days in Alliston, being lectured on the pl... Read more
Another undercover anti-chicken farm video has been circulating, accusing Canadian chicken farmers of cruelty to animals. Problem is, this video does not depict a Canadian chicken farm. But... Read more
The start of the South American soybean harvest in early March seemed to directly coincide with a significant downward trajectory in North American soybean prices. Yet throughout this whole... Read more
Just about every week I shake open the pages of the newspaper to find that some routine chore I have been performing since childhood has suddenly become illegal. Dragging trash to the road f... Read more
Should grain growers build on-farm storage bins to store grain crops so they’ll be able to sell when the price is better? That used to be the case, but not anymore. In recent years, prices... Read more
Some days you can tell by the way Uncle John opens the door of the diner that he’s full of wisdom and can’t cork himself up. Even if a person is reaching for his coat after three cups of cof... Read more
The Beef Farmers of Ontario annual meeting in Toronto conjures up images of rough and tumble guys in jeans wearing cowboy hats and enjoying many drinks. That may have been the case years ago... Read more
The key variable in North American grain markets over the course of the month of March each year is in fine tuning the estimates of planting intentions for the coming crop year. There are r... Read more
Last month, a reader asked why his cows might have shorter gestations than he expected. I am not sure that I can provide the exact reason for his cows, but it is a great opportunity to talk... Read more
I remember growing up in rural Eastern Ontario in the 1970s and hearing my father complain about caretaker politicians, so-called do-nothing ministers of large portfolios who didn’t do much... Read more
A winter job was to get rid of the old receipts dating back to 2000. Definitely too old, so I started opening binders and dumping the contents in a huge garbage bag to be burnt, stopping at... Read more
Just got back from yet another farm conference where the tech guru made the scary prediction that anybody who is not totally committed to digital technology today will not be farming in five... Read more
A century ago, over half of Canada’s population were farmers. Most folks understood farming as it was done then because it was fairly simple. Today people are so far removed from agriculture... Read more
In the past two years, my provincial and federal taxes have increased. I lost my federal tax credit for my children’s soccer and swimming lessons. Our family’s child care tax credit has decr... Read more
The total demand for Ontario grown wheat in this province’s flour mills is roughly 560,000 tonnes. Assuming that the North American Free Trade Agreement stays intact, we can traditionally mo... Read more
Canadian dairy product per capita consumption is publicly updated every quarter by the federal government. Canadian dairy imports and exports are tallied on a monthly basis by Statistics Can... Read more
In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, doorways, passages, and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to t... Read more
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The announced closing of up to 29 rural schools by the Upper Canada District School Board has woken people up. Apparently many were oblivious while the education system rotted in our rural... Read more
By Dr. Sylvain Charlebois From farm to fork, our food is responsible for around 25% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. This is much higher than what most people would think. Whether we... Read more
In the Christmas season when so much of society’s conversation is about the joy of giving, and the value of generosity, it would seem appropriate if the commodity markets would share a littl... Read more
Elections are a blunt-force instrument we use on the body politic to move it forward, much like a mahout prods the elephant with a goad. Votes by themselves tell us almost nothing about who... Read more
In some countries, pigs are a lucky symbol and pork is eaten to ring in the New Year. It’s symbolic because pigs root forward while they forage for food (as opposed to cows, which stand stil... Read more
Some are interpreting Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential election win as a rural roar. Looking at an election result map, aside from the urban West Coast and North East in Democrat blue, a vas... Read more
In mid-October, I was involved in a series of seminars with dairy farmers about how farmers actually treat cows and calves on their farms. Each seminar started with a short introduction, fol... Read more
I have been scoffing at animal activists and vegans for most of my adult life. That is partly because my mother came from a long line of Free Thinkers and food faddists who all shared the sa... Read more
By Sylvain Charlebois After the shock comes the reality of understanding what a Trump Presidency and a Republican-dominated Congress will mean to all of us. Over the last two years, policie... Read more
By Patrick Meagher SWEET BUTTER CRUMPETS! What happened in America? The American people crowned the man that the mainstream news media vilified. They crowned the man that Facebook users call... Read more
By Steve Kell All too often as we analyze commodity markets, there tends to be a preoccupation to look just at the big “bottom line” numbers such as total supply and total demand... Read more
November is election month for Ontario’s largest farm organization, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA). It should be something farmers care about. But I dare say that most don’t. Su... Read more
By Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, Dalhousie University Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is learning the hard way that multilateral trade agreements, agriculture and food always create a recipe for con... Read more
We, the people, are full of trouble and incongruities. Sometimes we’re only a little better than children. This is reinforced with observations from current events. Last month the U.S. Envir... Read more
By Sylvain Charlebois Dean of the Faculty of Management, Professor in Distribution and Policy, Dalhousie University It is becoming cheaper to buy food in Canada. Canada experienced deflation... Read more
By Dr. Rob Tremblay Down dairy cows, or ‘downers’, are not common but they are a challenge to deal with for dairy farmers and veterinarians. Downers can be a lightning rod for tension... Read more
I am not what you would call a ‘Facebook Fanatic.’ I only joined this past winter to connect with a friend who had moved. My personal picture is of the canning in my cold room last fall. I d... Read more
It was only four years ago, but we are already getting nostalgic about the grain markets in 2012 and 2013 following a big drought which produced small grain crops in the United States, and p... Read more
By Ian Cumming In late August, in a Toronto-area courthouse, Oxford County farmer Eric Van Boekel was being grilled on the witness stand by an animal activist’s defence lawyer. The lawyer’s... Read more
By Patrick Meagher The cancellation of the greasy pig contest last month at an Eastern Ontario fair isn’t the end of the world but it offers us just one more clue that perhaps the 21st centu... Read more
By grain merchant Steve Kell I don’t know how many people got to watch the bull riding at the Calgary Stampede in the first week of July, but anyone watching the commodity markets buck and t... Read more
Commentary by Angela Dorie Most likely the email inboxes at the Dairy Farmers of Ontario were filled with questions from farmers that seemed to all begin with: “What the hell…?” It was Frida... Read more