by Breanne Baker | Oct 29, 2010 | Agriculture Industry, Articles, Kevin Hursh
There’s increasing anguish over grading standards. The Canadian Grain Commission always says that it tries to apply all the grading standards equally from one year to the next, but a lot of the grading factors are open to human interpretation. Beyond the official...
by Breanne Baker | Oct 27, 2010 | Agriculture Industry, Articles, Kevin Hursh
The National Farmers Union has generated a lot of attention by its efforts to block a comprehensive trade deal between Canada and the European Union. The NFU claims to have received a secret draft of the text and they say the deal would be bad news for Canadian...
by Breanne Baker | Oct 26, 2010 | Agriculture Industry, Articles, Kevin Hursh
What do you consider big when it comes to a grain operation? What about cattle? What’s a big cow-calf operation? Consider a grain farm that grows 30 bushels per acre of wheat with the wheat worth $5.50 a bushel. It takes about 1,500 acres to have a gross return of...
by Breanne Baker | Oct 25, 2010 | Agriculture Industry, Articles, Kevin Hursh
With the fall calf run underway, cow-calf producers are rejoicing over the dramatic improvement in prices. However, there is still very little profit. The Western Beef Development Centre has been doing an extensive cost of production analysis with producers and...
by Breanne Baker | Oct 22, 2010 | Agriculture Industry, Articles, Kevin Hursh
It would be interesting to see a study on this, but I’d bet that farmers in Western Canada have a much bigger investment in grain storage than producers in almost any other country. Despite all the capacity and continued sales of new bins, anytime there’s a decent...
by Breanne Baker | Oct 22, 2010 | Agriculture Industry, Articles, Kevin Hursh
The potential takeover of Potash Corp is a huge political issue. One aspect of that debate involves Canpotex, the marketing arm for all three of the Saskatchewan potash companies – Potash Corp, Agrium and Mosaic. BHP Billiton has suggested that if it is successful in...