Why do you farm? Barb Glen posted the results from a U.S. publication’s poll that asked that question. I was surprised at how highly independence ranked on the poll. I know that independence was a huge factor for my dad when he farmed but I didn’t realize it was so widespread. I would have thought [...]
Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country. – William Jennings Bryan I was reading If agriculture dies, ‘there is nothing’ about the water situation in [...]
I’ve been reviewing our crop scouting reports for the summer of 2009. There are a couple of fields where we’ve seen weeds move from not present to a significant problem. The key factor for these fields is that weed management has been intermittent. We only scout these fields when certain crops are planted, so there’s [...]
In this talk, Lalitesh Katragadda from Google discusses how they are working om mapping more of the world. I know that I find maps incredibly useful in our day-to-day work here at Tone Ag. One of the first things I do with a new client or damage claim is work up a set of maps [...]
One of the questions that comes when discussing manure separation is “What do we do with the separated solids?” The phosphorus content of the liquids has been reduced enough to allow for application near the barn, but the solids and their nutrients still need to be dealt with. Exnstion.org has How much does it costs [...]
Martin Entz has an article in this week’s Western Producer (page 10) where he discusses the problems with biotech companies’ words. Dr. Entz has been working on sustainable agriculture for years and his presentations are definitely worth listening to. I think that biotech will be one of the things that keeps farmers producing more food [...]
Agriwebinar has a great talk from Jolene Brown on the The Top Ten Stupid Things Families Do To Break Up Their Business! Unfortunately I can’t link to the talk directly. However, you can go register for free on the Agriwebinar site then go to Search/View all past Webinars to find this talk. A lot of [...]
For those who weren’t convinced by Dr. Flaten’s presentation that Manitoba can deal with hogs in an enviromentally sustainable manner, maybe a few cute pigs will help sway their hearts? Mental Floss presents Ten Pigs We Love. The pigs we deal with aren’t prone to breaking into song and dance numbers (or philosophical discussions) but [...]
They’ve put up the proceedings for the Manitoba Agronomists Conference 2009, so for the rest of the presentations, I’m going to just highlight points that caught my attention. Doug Wilcox’s The good, the bad and the ugly of Manitoba crop production was an attempt at quantifying the quality of years for crop production. He emphasized [...]
