Archives for July 2010

Mexico has agreed to a 60-day delay in implementing new restrictions on wild buckwheat in Canadian canaryseed. Speaking yesterday at the Canadian Special Crops Association annual meeting in Saskatoon, Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz announced that he had talked to his counterpart in Mexico to arrange the brief reprieve. This means that a number of railcars …

Cattle producers were excluded from the federal-provincial Excess Moisture Program announced as an AgriRecovery initiative. The day of the $30 an acre announcement, the Saskatchewan Cattlemen’s Association issued a news release saying it expected governments to include standing pasture and hay lands that had been flooded. However, only annual cropland is included. Yesterday, the Manitoba …

Viterra has released its own update of seeded acreage in Western Canada, along with how the reduction in acres may affect the financial results of the company. Viterra estimates that eight million acres went unseeded and another two million acres have been lost to excess rains. This is a bit less than the estimates coming …

Rarely do governments act so quickly and decisively. I was amazed when the meeting of federal and provincial agriculture ministers resulted in a program announcement for flooded Prairie farmland. Usually the closing news conference to these meetings is short on tangible action and long on bafflegab. There is no perfect program to deal with the …

Genetically modified wheat has moved one step closer to reality. BASF and Monsanto are expanding their research cooperation to include GM wheat. Their plan is to introduce the first yield-enhanced wheat to the market at some point after 2020. Varieties with stress tolerance traits would be introduced later. A collaborative agreement between BASF and Monsanto …

Record high rainfall is going to mean record high hay and pasture production in much of the Prairie region. The difficulty may be getting hay cut and baled in a timely manner to preserve quality. For a lot of cattle producers, it will be a year to stockpile forage production for the inevitable years when …

Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz has completed his third trade mission to China in less than a year. During the mission, China agreed to formally lift the ban on Canadian boneless beef under thirty months of age. Ritz kicked off his mission by serving up the first plates of Canadian beef available in China in almost …

With almost no fanfare, Saskatchewan has passed a new climate change bill that should theoretically provide a mechanism for farmers to be paid for carbon credits. However, the devil will be in the details and the regulations for the bill have yet to be established. A few years ago, Alberta initiated a program whereby that …

Ralph Goodale, the lone Liberal MP in the province, is the latest politician to tour the areas hardest hit by spring rains. Goodale is calling on governments to commit to assistance quickly so farmers know where they stand, but he doesn’t seem to have any suggestions for exactly how governments should provide assistance. Some have …