Hursh Comment

Durum prices have nowhere to go but up. Bruce Burnett, the director of weather and market surveillance for the Canadian Wheat Board spoke to a farmer meeting yesterday at the Western Canada Farm Progress Show in Regina. Burnett says only about 40 per cent of the North Dakota durum crop has been seeded due to …

Farmers in southeastern Saskatchewan are in trouble. Only a limited amount of crop has been seeded, time is running out and rain continues to fall. The crop report that came out on May 26 estimated provincial seeding progress at 54 per cent as of May 23, up from just 23 in the report for the …

Every growing season is unique and brings something you’ve never seen before. Our farmyard is on the edge of a saline slough called Boggy Lake. The “lake” has been dry most of the past 20 years. Often we’re driving across it by this point in the spring. This year, the lake is higher than I’ve …

I love the seeding monitor I installed this spring. I’ve been threatening to do it for a couple years, but the cost and the hassle of installation had thwarted those plans until this year. I’m sure there are lots of good blockage monitoring systems, but I went with Agtron, a Saskatoon company I’ve done some …

The Canadian Wheat Board’s single desk function has had more lives than a cat, but its days are now numbered. All the signals coming from the new Conservative majority government indicate that marketing choice will be delivered on both barley and wheat. There’s no use going through all the acrimonious debate again. Change, for better …

It has been many years since I first started doing a daily radio commentary. Some of you who read this report on the website or receive the report by email may not realize that this is the text version of a report than runs on various Saskatchewan radio stations. April 29 marks my last radio …

I put about 1,200 kilometers on my truck the past couple days on a road trip from southwest Saskatchewan all the way up to Viking, Alberta and back. Along the way, I passed by Leader, Alsask, Marengo, Kindersley, Rosetown and Swift Current on the Saskatchewan side and Oyen, Hanna and Killam on the Alberta side. …

Statistics Canada spent a lot of money doing its Seeding Intentions Report released yesterday, but the report has limited value. A total of 12,600 farmers were surveyed at the end of March to come up with the numbers. The report seems to assume that we will suddenly have a normal year and all the acres …

Here’s an early season test of weather forecasts. On Monday, the Environment Canada forecast sounded quite favourable. There was 30 to 60 per cent chance of some showers for some of the days later in the week for a number of locations, but it didn’t sound like very much precipitation. By contrast, World Weather Inc. …

This may come as a surprise to those still suffering from flooding, but if the weather holds, a bit of seeding will take place in Saskatchewan this week. The extreme southwest corner of the province is usually the first out of the gate. Many years, seeding is underway there by the middle of April. This …

The Manitoba Canola Growers Association has opened a can of worms by conducting a farmer survey on the voluntary marketing of canola through the Canadian Wheat Board. The arguments for and against the single desk are well known. In this case, just the idea of voluntary canola marketing by the board has caused a wave …

The low European tolerance for glyphosate residue on lentils could make marketing the crop more difficult if glyphosate has been used in a pre-harvest application. Saskatchewan Pulse Growers and Pulse Canada have put together a fact sheet to answer some of the most common questions on the issue. They say that even if a producer …