Protein crests current appetite wave

Holiday feasts often reflect the latest fads and trends influencing how we eat.

This Thanksgiving’s table is likely to feature more Canadian content than it might otherwise as a point of national pride.

In the recent past, the carb-free craze has made cauliflower a substitute for the mashed potatoes on some family spreads. Some have gone meatless, while others have added more. Still others offer gluten-free, dairy-free or fat-free alternatives.

Nowadays, it seems consumers can’t get enough protein. Desmond Sobool, deputy chief economist Farm Credit Canada, told a recent economic update for the agri-food sector there are two converging influences in play.

Wet weather heats up feed grain availability

Other than those in another rain cloud, it’s hard to find the silver linings attached to this year’s soggy harvest.

A showery September continued to cause delays and more deterioration in both quality and yield. Plus, the costs of mitigating post-harvest losses to spoilage are rising as the delays push further into fall. It takes more heat and time to artificially dry down grain as temperatures cool.

Crops harvested in August before the weather turned warm and damp came off with good quality and average yields. But farmers in some areas, such as southwest Manitoba, had only started when the rains came. Now they are plagued with standing water and sprouting swaths of grain that might not even make feed quality.

Suffice to say crop insurance adjusters are going to be busy this fall.

Multiple factors add up to difficult harvest

Earlier this month, farmers sent agriculture publications some heartbreaking photos showing how heavy rains across the Prairies had pummelled a promising harvest.

An idled combine up to its axles in a flooded Saskatchewan field, straw bales surrounded by water and field equipment stranded on the far side of a washed-out section told the obvious story.

The Sept. 6-7 event was just the latest in a series of heavy rainfall events that have plagued this year’s growing season. Similar deluges hit different regions July 15-17, Aug. 14, and Aug. 31 — some of which were accompanied by tornadoes.

“What’s made this season challenging is the intensity of these rainfalls,” said Manitoba Agriculture ag meteorology specialist Alison Sass as she reviewed the summer’s weather patterns on an extension webinar.

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.