Reading Time: 2 minutes I must take issue with several of the points raised in a Mar. 28 letter by Mr. Woods regarding the Canadian Wheat Board’s recent decision to purchase two lake vessels. Firstly, the CWB is not a Crown corporation; it uses a shared governance model with 10 elected farmer directors and five appointed by the federal […] Read more
Lakers Also Benefit Alberta Farmers
Transmission Lines Not Needed
Reading Time: 2 minutes Re: the MATL transmission line project from Lethbridge to Great Falls (AF Feb. 2), I found myself wondering if MATL has already acquired a permit to export electricity. TransAlta has an NEB permit to export 17.5 million megawatts to the U.S. annually and Encana has applied to export another five million. Meanwhile MLAs and ministers […] Read more
Bill 11 Entrenches Wrong Decision On Hunt Farms
Reading Time: 3 minutes Agriculture Minister Jack Hayden probably thought Bill 11, the Livestock Industry Diversification Amendment Act, would go unnoticed through the legislative process and dodge media scrutiny. That probably would have happened, but for the good old boys at the Alberta Fish and Game Association (AFGA) who quickly sounded the conspiracy alarm. That alerted city media and […] Read more
A Market-Based Approach For Environmental Goods And Services
Reading Time: 2 minutes president Western Stock Growers’ Association The Western Stock Growers’ Association (WSGA) extends an invitation to the Alberta government to restart a valued pilot program exploring the use of market-based environmental goods and services. In the spring of 2010, on the advice of the Minister of Sustainable Resource Development Mel Knight, the WSGA proposed that a […] Read more
DDGs An Overlooked Element Of The Ethanol Equation
Reading Time: 2 minutes Ethanol producers often get much of the blame for driving the price of corn to its current multi-year high levels due to that industry’s strong usage of corn to make fuel. But critics overlook the growing production and distribution of dried distiller’s grains (DDGs), a byproduct of ethanol output used in animal feeds as an […] Read more
A Real Inconvenient Truth Is Exposed
Reading Time: 3 minutes Those that have watched with some consternation the evolution of organic food marketing have been aware of a glaring discrepancy that advocates try to cover up. It has to do with a plain and simple question: how does one really know if organic food is really organic? The reality with organic food is that on […] Read more
Cheap Food Versus Expensive Oil
Reading Time: 2 minutes You can’t have cheap food and expensive oil. It just doesn’t work. For hundreds of millions of people who earn only a dollar or two a day, increasing prices for staple foods like grains, pulses, rice and cooking oil is a big deal. Canadians spend only about 11 per cent of their disposable income on […] Read more
It’s Time For The Grain Industry To Stop Embracing Change
Reading Time: 3 minutes The good old days weren’t always so good if you were an elevator manager, or especially an elevator manager’s assistant. You had to be pretty handy with a shovel when you were loading a boxcar. Then you had to “cooper” those cars before shipment, sealing the doors with kraft paper and wooden or metal “grain […] Read more
LETTERS – for Mar. 28, 2011
Reading Time: 2 minutes I have delayed writing this letter to see if there was a apology coming from Allen Oberg and the CWB board of directors. Instead of an apology the board is now spending our money to run ads telling us how brilliant they are in purchasing a couple of boats. I think they owe us an […] Read more
Provincial Government Bites Back At Critics
Reading Time: 3 minutes It was a long time in coming, but the Alberta government finally acknowledged that maybe – just maybe – there were some misunderstandings with Bill 36, the Alberta Land Stewardship Act. They have introduced Bill 10, which amends the original legislation. Sustainable Resource Development Minister Mel Knight was not admitting that they had made any […] Read more