This blog post, Sustainable Wheat Production Through Intensification, make a good point. If we want to preserve more wilderness area and reduce agriculture’s geographic footprint, we need higher yields. Farmers don’t want to farm marginal land. Before widespread use of fertilizers and better crop varieties, the only way to produce more food was to clear [...]
This article is a good rebuttal to those who think we should abandon industrial farming: The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals. The key point that Blake Hurst is making in this article is that that industrial farming is the most efficient mode of farming we’ve ever had. There is no comparing the productivity per acre [...]
This is almost a year old, but it still has lots of good information to think about: What’s a Farm in 2010? A couple of things stuck out. First, even today most farms tend to be family businesses regardless of size. If you want to farm, you’d better be comfortable working with relatives. Second is [...]
I was looking up some yield figures on the MASC site and I kept running across Risk Area 32. If you go to the maps, Risk Area 32 is nowhere to be seen. Shades of Area 51! Have I run across a vast government conspiracy? Sadly it’s nothing so exciting – MASC Risk Area 32 [...]
John Heard posed the question “Which Supply of Phosphorus is more Critical to Producing High Yields: Fertile Soil or Applied Fertilizer?” The answer is that you are better off with high soil test P than with putting on high levels of P2O5 fertilizer. I find this encouraging as we deal with high soil test P [...]
I just ran across this National Geographic article about soil: Our Good Earth: The future rests on the soil beneath our feet. There is some alarming information in there about the loss of of agricultural soil to various practices. What encouraged me is that there are practical operations taking place all over the world that [...]
Marc Trudelle from Quebec was our first speaker. His talk was on the measures Quebec hog producers have taken to ensure that their farms are sustainable. He had a clear definition of sustainable: “Sustainable development is defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet [...]
Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Initiatives has collected a list of Soil Survey Resources. This seems to be a fairly current and comprehensive list. There are a number of presentations on the site which could be useful for providing a quick overview of different aspects of soil survey. One of the big questions that I [...]
I attended the Agvise 2011 Canadian Soil Fertility Seminar in Carman last week. There were a lot of really impressive speakers there. Here are a few of my notes on what was covered. Nutrient Trends – Using the Data. John Heard John Heard led off by letting us know that Better Crops Magazine has recent [...]
I found this Scientific American podcast interesting: How You Gonna Keep Flu Down on the Farm?: Pig Farms and Public Health. What I liked about this podcast is that it doesn’t make farmers out to be villains. If anything Helen Branswell seems to take a farm-friendly perspective. It’s a good overview of what the health [...]
