Featured – Kevin Hursh

Changes are occurring in farm financing. At the Crossroads Crop Conference underway in Calgary, a lender highlighted some of the financing trends.  ATB Financial is a provincial body that lends primarily in Alberta, but Jonathan Neutons, ATB’s head of agriculture, addressed farm finance changes occurring across the prairies. One of the big changes has been […]

Producer payment security is not a top-of-mind issue for producers until suddenly a grain buyer runs into financial difficulty and they aren’t paid for their delivered grain. Even if you think this will never happen to you, the current system is still costing you money. There should be a better way. In simple terms, grain […]

The seeded acreages for flax and mustard are expected to drop dramatically this spring while large acreage increases are expected for oats, chickpeas and lentils.  Meanwhile, the price of almost every grain, oilseed and specialty crop is expected to drop, and in some cases, the declines are large. The projections are in the latest outlook by […]

Crop returns in the coming year look much more promising for some crops than others. Each year at the Crop Production Show, the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture releases its Crop Planning Guide for the upcoming year. The guide details all the variable costs of growing each crop including seed, fertilizer and crop protection products as well […]

At Tuesday’s annual meeting of the Saskatchewan Pulse Growers Association, a resolution on variety use agreements, also sometimes referred to as trailing royalties, received a great deal of debate culminating in a very close vote. Sask Pulse has a breeding agreement with the private plant breeding company Limagrain and royalties will be part of the […]

With a few notable exceptions, most grains, oilseeds and specialty crops are seeing lower prices than one year ago. Cash prices for canola started 2023 in the $800 a tonne range. There were ups and downs through the year, but overall prices ratcheted lower ending the year barely above $600 a tonne. That’s a move […]

While there have been ups and downs, the past 15 years have seen record profitability in the grain sector. Along with that has come rapid land price increases and much larger farms. It’s interesting how the quest for profitability has switched to doing the grain business better rather than finding profitable alternatives. Diversification used to […]

Some changes are coming to the meeting events organized by the crop commissions in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta over the next couple of months. There’s no longer one large meeting event with keynote speakers during Crop Production Week in Saskatoon. SaskCanola, Sask Wheat, SaskBarley, SaskFlax and Saskatchewan Pulse Growers are holding back-to-back annual business meetings […]

Statistics Canada has just released a large amount of farm financial data. SaskAgToday.com’s chief agricultural editor Kevin Hursh has this analysis of the numbers: Most of the Stats Can data is up until the end of 2022 and covers income, expenses, government support payments and farm debt. It’s a blizzard of numbers, but here are […]

Nearly 10,000 randomly selected farms and ranches across Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba will have received an invitation to participate in a Citizens Assembly on Agriculture. From those who apply, 36 lottery-selected producers will gather to work on climate and sustainability solutions for agriculture. Producers can register for the process even if they didn’t receive an […]