January 2018—I don’t usually make New Year’s resolutions, but I have one specific work goal for this year: To increase Canola Watch subscriptions by 50 per cent. Canola Watch is an email update to address real issues – insects, diseases and more – found in canola fields across the Prairies. It comes out each week during...
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November 2017—Pork supply in Japan was 2.17 kg per person per year in 1961. (I know pork isn’t canola, but stay with me.) Pork supply in Japan rose steadily over the next 50 years to 20.51 in 2011. The rapid adoption of pork into the diet was even more dramatic in China, going from 2.36 to...
Read More September 2017—When Garry Thiel’s father grew rapeseed for the first time in the late 1940s, he straight combined the crop. Granted, this was Polish canola, which had better shatter tolerance than Argentine of the day, but I find it significant that the first inclination for early adopters like the Thiels was to cut and combine in...
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March 2017—It dawned on me recently that I had a warped view of “connection to the land”. I thought most people would feel a strong family connection to their farm. But really, most land a farmer owns or rents these days does not have a strong connection to family history. And lots of farm families are...
Read More January 2017—Online shopping disrupted the economics of bricks and mortar stores. Uber disrupted the taxi business. We had a neighbour who used to sell the World Book encyclopedia. She doesn’t do that anymore because Google and Wikipedia disrupted – actually killed – the reference books business. Inspired by a tech presentation at the Bayer Agronomy Summit,...
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