Beware invasive, ‘frightening’ waterhemp

There’s a threat lurking on the edge of Manitoba farmers’ fields this fall that’s even scarier than the escalating trade war with their biggest customer.

Provincial extension advisers are warning farmers to watch for a weed known as “tall waterhemp,” which, true to its name, may already be towering above ready-to-harvest crops.

Those wispy tentacles waving in the breeze look pretty innocuous from a distance. But this highly invasive member of the pigweed family produces hundreds of thousands of seeds that are just itching for dispersal through farmers’ combines and across their fields.

Each of those tiny seeds — one small pill container filled halfway holds 44,000 — can produce plants with stems the width of saplings and heights of two to five metres. One or two plants can quickly turn into a patch. If waterhemp takes over a field, it can choke out the growing crop and cut yields by more than 90 per cent.

Summer flooding sinks some fall harvest hopes

A number of Manitoba farmers say they are expecting this year’s harvest to be one of the worst they’ve seen after major flooding decimated fields at the start of summer.

Bob Elliot, who has been farming east of Stonewall for 43 years, said he’s expecting the operation’s 5,500 acres to produce roughly half their normal yield.

Stonewall has logged the most precipitation this summer, with 523 millimetres of rainfall between May 1 and Aug. 16, according to Manitoba’s weather conditions report.

Elliot said the amount of rain has created a “unique” situation for farmers. “This is something that I don’t think anyone around here has ever seen.”

California tech company sees Manitoba as strategic gateway to dairy market

GROSSE ISLE — An AI-first California-based company that creates software for the dairy industry is establishing its Canadian headquarters in Winnipeg.

Spade Technologies announced Thursday it will build a team in Manitoba, positioning the province as the centre of its Canadian operations and a strategic gateway to the broader North American dairy market.

The company’s Canadian expansion is backed by SVG Ventures Thrive, a global agrifood innovation and investment platform. The Silicon Valley-based organization is investing $1.4 million into Spade via its Pioneer Fund, which invests in high-growth, early-stage agrifood technology companies.

The fund is backed by Farm Credit Canada as its anchor investor, alongside strategic limited partners including the Manitoba First Fund.

Crop storage headaches loom on horizon

A sense of calm descends over Prairie fields this time of year — at least on the surface.

Activities become more limited in the weeks leading up to harvest. There’s not much farmers can do now to support this year’s crop, other than monitor and protect it from diseases such as sclerotinia in canola and leaf stripe and fusarium head blight in wheat and barley.

July is when you might see farmers wading into a thick stand of canola, conducting a so-called “wet pants test” to get a low-tech read on how much disease-inducing moisture is lurking in the canopy.

Disease pressure is high in a humid, hot summer like this one and it’s kept aerial applicators busy applying fungicides. Sclerotinia spores live on plant residues in the soil and blossom into a mould that destroys the canola stem, starving the maturing pods.

Automation reaches new heights on farm

LANGHAM, Sask. — The thousands of farmers from across the Prairies who flock to the annual Ag in Motion show every July seem oblivious to the possibility the technology on display could one day replace many of them.

Families with children in tow, Hutterite colony workers, grandparents and young couples just starting out roamed through the 600 or more exhibitor displays, amazed at how everything about farming just keeps getting bigger, more efficient and increasingly more automated.

It’s now possible to seed using a 100-foot-wide drill — a 12-foot jump over the widest available a few years ago — provided the farmer can afford a tractor with enough horsepower to pull it. Those sell for around $850,000 and up.

Granted, the number of farms with enough acres to justify that kind of width and drawing power is still relatively small, but farms continue to grow. And it’s no secret the number of people who have the interest, skills and financial wherewithal to run them continues to shrink.

Kernza clicks some boxes to turn back clock

About 20 years ago, I hopped into a van with some university researchers, students and a government policy analyst to travel a long day’s drive south to the Land Institute in Kansas.

Established by Wes and Dana Jackson in the mid-1970s, the non-profit educational and research centre is trying to take modern agriculture back 10,000 years to revisit its pivot from perennial harvesting to annual cropping and reverse ecological damage.

It offers a fascinating premise — although one many would characterize as unrealistic and impractical by modern measures.

When plants complete their life cycle within one growing season, they put all their energy into producing viable seeds which become the nutritional powerhouses farmers harvest for food ingredients.

Grain latest Port of Churchill shipment

Prairie grain will soon ship out of the Port of Churchill for the first time in at least five years.

Starting Friday, grain will be moved to the northern Manitoba port from The Pas, via the Hudson Bay Railway. Few details were provided Wednesday.

A global agricultural company, based in Canada, will send its grain to international markets via the deep-water port. The first ship should leave Churchill at the end of August or beginning of September, said Chris Avery, president of Arctic Gateway Group, the port’s owner.

Arctic Gateway Group is talking with other companies also looking to ship grain, Avery added.

Uncertainty bakes costs into CUSMA chain

Despite all the melodramatic hype and handwringing leading up to it, the July 1 timeline for renewing the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement on trade passed without a U.S. commitment to extend its 2036 sunset.

The sun still rose the next day. Trucks and trains are still crossing the border carrying Canadian commodities (albeit not on that new bridge named after a famous hockey player). Grocery stores still carry imported fruits and vegetables from the south, and Canadians in several provinces still can’t buy American liquor.

Nothing changed, except everything.

We must now accept the certainty of continued uncertainty as Canada, along with the rest of the world, considers how to deal with the increasingly erratic leadership at the helm of the world’s largest economy.

Big decisions put many farmers in same boat

There’s a lot of sweating, swatting, squinting — and quite possibly a little swearing — in Manitoba farmyards and fields this summer, as farmers navigate what’s turned into a hellish growing season.

Anyone required to work outdoors in the heat and humidity must also suffer through the relentless swarms of voracious mosquitoes and flies brought on by the recent wet weather. The biting insect populations are unlike anything we’ve seen in recent years and they’re making outside life miserable for humans and livestock alike.

It adds another layer to the frustration in a season when it seems nothing is going well. With each twist and turn, the “so now what?” questions keep piling up.

Just getting around the farm or to town for supplies is a chore with roads and bridges washed out in some areas. And the weather alerts just keep coming — warnings of tornadoes, severe thunderstorms and more heavy rain.

Farmers just one link in long supply chain

Farmers are hardly front and centre in newly released federal and provincial reports analyzing why food has become less affordable for many Canadians.

The word “farmers” doesn’t even appear in the Manitoba government’s Grocery Price Strategy report until Page 7.

That’s a good thing, because it signals a new level of awareness in how we collectively view the food system. The focus is shifting from front-line farmers to the largely invisible and complicated supply chain connecting field to table.

It might even change how farmers see themselves.

Significance of soil, water management

The day six inches of rain fell one early July afternoon is etched in my memories of growing up on a southern Manitoba grain farm in the mid-1960s.

Awaiting next stage in biofuels balancing act

There was a lot of mixed messaging over the role agriculture plays in climate change mitigation during the Justin Trudeau era, when the federal government was heavily focused on making the Canadian economy less dependent on carbon-based fuels.

“On the one hand, the federal government, for the last 10 years anyway, has certainly seen our crops as traditional food commodities and has treated their emissions as climate threats,” Grain Growers of Canada executive director Bruce Burrows told a recent webinar discussing Canada’s Clean Fuel Regulation (CFR).

“Yet on the other hand, under CFR, we’re celebrating these exact same crops when they’re turned into fuel, and so … it’s not food or fuel, it’s both.”

The identity crisis was further complicated by Canada’s increasingly testy relationship with its next-door neighbour and largest trading partner.

Mushroom producers face ‘worrying’ duties

Prices may mushroom for American fungi lovers — and the company behind a Manitoba grower is contesting new duties disrupting the industry.

Loveday Mushroom Farms ships roughly 10 million pounds of mushrooms annually from its Oakbank plant to the United States. It accounts for one-fifth of the mushrooms parent company South Mill Champs grows in Canada and sells south of the border.

“We’ve got a good customer base in the U.S. and Canada,” said Lewis Macleod, South Mill Champs chief executive.

But the American base will likely be hit with higher mushroom prices: South Mill Champs plans to pass a new duty to customers, upping the cost of its portabellas and shiitakes.

Balancing act of farm risk-management programs

It’s a long-standing and generally accepted principle of Canadian agricultural policy that farmers need taxpayers’ help countering the unpredictable and wildly fluctuating risks of their operating environment.

Farmers have some measure of control over production choices. Their management can increase yields and reduce reliance on expensive production aids such as fertilizer or pesticides. They can also build an allowance for the unexpected into their game plan, such as seeking off-farm income.

But that can only go so far.

Farmers can’t plan for weather, climate, twists and turns in crop prices, the effect of external forces such as U.S. President Donald Trump’s tantrums or becoming collateral damage in Canadian diplomatic spats with China.