Something awful has happened to your crop. Spray drift from the neighbor’s has killed half your crop, cows have wandered over and munched their way through your plastic silage cover, the latest drain modifications and heavy rains have washed away half your field, strips of the field were missed, hay was baled when it was [...]
Country Guide has a good post on why Lower “food miles” may not be greener. I liked this article because it gives a quick peek into some of the complexity in deciding which alternative is the better one. If it takes Kenyan rose producers 6,000 kg of carbon dioxide to sell roses in Europe and [...]
Finding your way around southern Manitoba requires that you be able to read legal descriptions. A custom GIS map can be extremely helpful, so here’s one way of finding a given quarter section in southern Manitoba using GIS. I find it useful for most of our agricultural consulting work. Download Manitoba Land Initiative’s Quarter Section [...]
The Holux GM-270 we’d been using recently died, so we replaced with a Garmin GPS 10x. Here’s what I think of it so far. Positive Tiny. It’s easy to clip to a belt or pocket and forget. Fast. It picks up a signal much, much more quickly than the Holux and a bit faster than [...]
National Geographic had a post a while back: Pig Poop Helps Power Netherlands. It describes converting methane from hog manure into electricity. This is well on its way to being a proven technology. For example, a Hutterite colony in Alberta has been converting methane to electricity for years. As I understand it, there are a [...]
I’ve had to look this up twice now, so I thought I would post it for anyone who is interested in the soils of southeast Manitoba. It’s a minor classification error in the electronic version of the reports versus the text version. Here’s the problem: In the Agricultural Interpretation Database by Municipality for Hanover (hanover_shp), [...]
In this PopTech talk, Pamela Ronald argues that organic farming and Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) complement each other beautifully. GMOs are often thought of as extremely high-tech while organic farming is often thought of as a low-tech endeavor. Pamela Ronald argues that we’re going to need the sustainability of organic farming coupled with the productivity [...]
I found this article from the India Times to be thought provoking: Now, agricultural info on mobile phones. In a lot of ways Tone Ag Consulting’s business revolves around getting information to and from farmers, applicators, and researchers. The Internet is a huge boon for getting us access to researchers and research data, but so [...]
As a follow-up to Friday’s post on Environment Canada Weather Stations, I have made up files showing the Manitoba Ag-Weather Program Stations. NOTE: These are going to be even more inaccurate than the Environment Canada Weather Stations. The points represent the towns that share the names of the Manitoba Ag-Weather Stations rather than the actual [...]
As I mentioned in an earlier post, it would be useful to have a map showing the weather stations around Manitoba. It looks as though there are about 50 stations across Manitoba that provide hourly weather data. I have taken the coordinates from the National Climate Data and Information Archive and mapped the approximate locations [...]
