Brian Sewell’s first entrepreneurial venture was anything but what you’d expect from a teen who’d decided from day one to take up the family business. But for Army of Darkness Skateboards (AOD for short), Brian’s mobile skate shop and manufacturing company, it rolled straight out of his farming experience.

With certain pockets of Western Canada being dealt losing hands at harvest year after year, grain drying is moving from a “nice to have” to a “need to have.”

Part of the Alberta Wheat Pool network for more than two decades, evolving technology, economics and grain-handling efficiencies caught up to the Buffalo Sloped Bin (BSB) grain elevator. The first of these remains operational at Magrath.

Spring wheat is Western Canada’s most significant crop. In the northern Prairies, though, much of the wheat grown for bread ends up being downgraded due to frost damage. This creates difficulties for farmers at harvest, but also impacts their bottom line. Dean Spaner, a University of Alberta Faculty of Agricultural, Life and Environmental Sciences professor, is addressing the problem in a research project funded by the Alberta Wheat Commission (AWC). The initiative will examine early-maturity traits in the hopes of addressing the challenge.

“… because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; this is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns; the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”—Donald Rumsfeld, former United States secretary of defence.

Darcy Goossen has been farming full-time for more than two decades, but he’s been an inventor his whole life. The Ferintosh farmer can’t even count the number of “handy dandy farm tools” he’s made, but now there is one that certainly stands alone in his mind. Goossen’s Tiregrabber took home the prestigious honour of Best Invention at Canada’s Farm Progress Show (FPS) in Regina, SK, this past year. He edged out Robert Pytlyk, creator of a predator-proof chicken run.

According to five agriculture professionals, pursuing a career in seed may be a rewarding path for recent high school graduates as well as those further along in their studies or now employed in other sectors.

Kevin Auch is looking for one more crop to complete an ideal rotation on his 5,500-acre farm near Carmangay. He’s working with a pretty decent five-crop rotation right now, and each should comprise 20 per cent of his cropped acres.

In 2019 the Faculty of Agricultural, Life and Environmental Sciences (ALES) will celebrate a century of teaching and research in the discipline of soil science. It is fitting that we will also celebrate the 90th anniversary of the faculty’s Breton Plots, which were established to identify ways to enhance the fertility of the province’s grey luvisols.

According to farm financial experts, the escalation of land value is shifting the farm-financial paradigm and may change the firmly rooted impulse to build farm operations primarily upon owned acres.