Food Genetics – farmers created it all
(November 28, 2018) Editor’s Note: The Federal Government and representatives of the three giant agro-chemical-seed companies are working to take control of seed genetics away from prairie farmers and the Canadian public. The following compilation of two articles by my late friend and colleague Paul Beingessner about how grain and other food genetics are created by farmers is more...
Read MoreEnd of Wheat Board marks end of frontier values of cooperation and equality
(August 1, 2017) The end of the Canadian Wheat Board five years ago certainly proves that unregulated capitalism works very effectively for the powerful and well organized. Declining numbers and increasing debt show it does not work for farmers. The CWB was a hybrid organization providing farmers with collective bargaining power, a professional standards association, and a world-wide reputation...
Read MoreThe cost of losing food sovereignty
CWBA presentation to rural Alberta NDP (April 23, 2017) A few weeks ago I was invited to the annual general meeting of the Alberta NDP Party’s Rural Caucus to give a 20 minute presentation on issues facing agriculture which you can read here. The meeting was held in Camrose, Alberta, in the heart of some of the most productive farm land in Alberta. The audience for this meeting consisted of...
Read MoreLooming problems in antibiotics a warning for plant breeding
(January 19, 2017) I had a great-aunt who only lived for nine days in 1919. Like so many children and young women in the age before antibiotics she was killed by a simple bacterium that can now be cured with a short round of antibiotics. From the 1930s onward those antibiotics were developed by dozens of private companies driven by a profit motive usually provided by government procurements to...
Read MoreProducing poverty
(December 30, 2015) Earlier this year a think tank held out the carrot of population growth to encourage prairie farmers to go further into debt to purchase crop inputs and technology to increase production. I was reminded of this again a few weeks ago when a couple of colleagues sent me a note from a private grain trader claiming “Canadian families save 58% on their weekly grocery bills thanks...
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