Blood dripped from Liz Roberts’s hand. She needed help but her cell phone showed no service. She stepped away from the fence stretcher that had gashed her hand. Driving to get medical help, she stopped several times to phone for assistance without success. From her family’s farm south of Cereal, Roberts arrived 30 minutes later in Oyen, a town of 1,000 hardy souls perched just south of Highway 9 in southeast Alberta, relieved to have remained conscious long enough to find a doctor and stitches for her wound.

The world’s food demand is increasing, but its supply of agricultural land is not. The challenge faced by the farming industry is to increase productivity, improve food security and boost farm income on a land base that is fixed, or in some cases, shrinking. One of the best strategies to address all these related demands is to encourage innovative scientific research.

Researchers from the University of Saskatchewan (U of S) have been awarded major funding in support of cutting-edge crop research geared to ultimately improve characteristics such as yield and disease resistance in wheat. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) and National Research Council Canada scientists as well as collaborators in Canada and the United States will also work on the project.

Through the Keep it Clean! program, partner groups communicate a clear and consistent message to farmers about on-farm practices that will help reduce market risk.

The CEO of DOT Autonomous
Robotic Farm Solutions, Robert Said wants to change the public’s view of farming.

BY STAN BLADE, P. Ag. 2019 is the year we in the University of Alberta’s faculty of Agricultural, Life and Environmental Sciences (ALES) celebrate a century of teaching and research in soil science. It is also our good fortune that this is the 90th anniversary of the Breton Plots. The ongoing long-term crop rotation experiment […]

Held in late July of 2019, the Made in Canada Crop Tour was conducted with the co-operation of four industry groups to help create just such barley buy in.

Encompassing land in the Calgary, Strathmore and Drumheller areas, the multi-generational Hilton Ventures grain farm produces high-quality malting barley, and family members operate Origin Malting and Brewing.

The orange blossom wheat midge is a delicate, bright-orange fly. It’s half the size of a mosquito. Yet these little flies have been known to cause yield loss of more than 50 per cent in Alberta’s wheat fields.

Farmer interest in various crops heats up and cools down from year to year. One crop that consistently gets the cold shoulder, however, is winter wheat. This has prompted some to ask why, and how can we break the ice in making winter wheat a hot commodity.