By Alexis Kienlen Glacier FarmMedia staff Being Alberta’s most northerly rural municipality isn’t Mackenzie County’s only claim to fame. “Right now, Mackenzie County has the highest number of organic farmers,” said Jacob Marfo, manager and research director of the Mackenzie Applied Research Association, (MARA). And the region may soon have more. MARA and Organic Alberta, […]
As Mike Kosaka and Adriane Skaros are learning, it takes determination, toughness, and plenty of smarts to succeed as a local-food startup. How many smarts? Read on By Madeleine Baerg Glacier FarmMedia staff Young Zoe Jones and Ava Kosaka have sized me up. The girls are ultra-enthusiastic entrepreneurs. They’ve got a marketing plan, they’ve perfected […]
High price of crop inputs drives decision to convert to organic production By Robert Arnason Glacier FarmMedia staff There are 25 grain bins in Travis Heide’s farmyard, including six massive ones with a capacity of 70,000 bushels each. In total, the bins can store around 550,000 bu. of grain. That’s enough for 10,000 acres of […]
By Lorraine Stevenson OrganicBiz staff Winnipeg documentary filmmaker Katharina Stieffenhofer came home from a farmers’ conference two years ago so inspired by what she’d heard and seen she wanted to tell others. She’d listened to talks by Martin Entz, plant scientist at the University of Manitoba, at the 2016 Prairie Organic Think Whole Farm conference. […]
By Alexis Stockford OrganicBiz staff Dan and Fran DeRuyck’s organic grain-cleaning plant is one of the first things a visitor sees when they arrive at Top of the Hill Farm, south of Treherne, Man. The large shed dominates the west side of the yard, bordered by bins which, on any given week, might be filled […]
University of Guelph – The next time you walk down the produce aisle of your grocery store, you may want to reach for red onions if you are looking to fight off cancer. In the first study to examine how effective Ontario-grown onions are at killing cancer cells, U of G researchers have found that […]
The Institute for Food and Development Policy, a nonprofit known as Food First, has released a new book entitled “Fertile Ground: Scaling Agroecology from the Ground Up”. Fertile Ground presents nine innovative case studies authored by agroecologists from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe to make a case for promoting the use […]
It is possible to be idealistic and make a profit By John Greig OrganicBiz staff When Brent Preston and his wife Gillian Flies moved to a small farm near Creemore, Ontario, they were idealistic Torontonians moving to the country to grow small-scale organic food. And for the first few years they tried to fit the […]
By Greg Berg OrganicBiz staff Livestock producers are always working to avoid mortalities, but they do happen and are an unfortunate part of production. In addition, dealing with the carcass afterward can be time consuming. On display at Manitoba Ag Days this past January, BioMulcher is designed to handle these dead animals by mechanically breaking them […]
By Lorraine Stevenson OrganicBiz staff During the summer, Daniel Gosselin’s and Suzanne Dufresne’s cows graze on pastures seeded to more than a dozen carefully chosen flowering plants. In winter, they move back indoors to a warm, spacious barn and switch over to a diet of dried fodder. The cow’s seasonal diet is the secret ingredient […]
