March 2022—Online events have one benefit – they give me a chance to participate in presentations outside of my immediate mandate. New ideas at low cost. In January, I attended a 90-minute session on Regenerative Cities, part of a webinar series on regenerative thinking. The presenter was Dominique Hes, an Australian architect who designed The Paddock,...
Read More January 2022—I have a guilty pleasure: House Hunters International. It’s a TV show about people moving from Saskatoon or Salt Lake City to Santiago or Seville. Viewers get to see what the new city looks like and follow the house hunters while a real estate agent shows them a few options. North Americans almost always complain...
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November 2021—Canada has just under 90 million acres of cropland, according to the census*, and the Prairies account for most of them. That sounds like a lot, but we are small potatoes. The global cropland area is 3.8 billion acres, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). About 1.5 billion acres...
Read More September 2021—Grasshoppers are eating everything in sight. Let’s party! That was the conclusion of community leaders in my home town of Hartney, Manitoba in 1987. I was a teenager on the farm in the 1980s. The decade started with high interest rates and farm foreclosures and ended with dry conditions and grasshoppers. “It wasn’t much fun,”...
Read More March 2021—I made vegan burgers for the first time ever. I’m not vegan, I’m not vegetarian, but these vegan burgers were right up my alley. They had wheat, oats, lentils and mushrooms – all of which were sourced from Western Canadian farms – and I wanted to try something different. I eat a diverse diet that...
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