Tag: agriculture

Cyberfarming

City dwellers tend to think of the high-tech revolution as primarily an urban phenomenon–hip office workers thumb-typing messages to each other on their pagers while standing in line for lattes, for example. But the countryside is well on its way to becoming as high-tech as the city, as new technologies relentlessly transform agriculture into something …

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Are bananas doomed?

Canadians eat approximately three billion bananas a year; it’s our favorite fruit. But a recent news story suggests the bananas we enjoy so much could be extinct within 10 years. The villain is a fungus by the ominous name of Black Sigatoka that’s spreading out of control through the banana-growing countries of the world, threatening …

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Fruit

 just came back from a vacation that included a brief stay in the Okanagan. Among the treasures from that visit were two containers of delicious fresh apricots and cherries, courtesy of a friend who owns an orchard near Oliver. The amount of fruit produced by the trees of the Okanagan Valley alone is staggering: everywhere …

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Seeding

The modern farm is highly mechanized, but the goal of the farmer driving a $100,000 tractor across multiple hectares remains the same as that of a farmer scraping the ground with a pointed stick: a successful harvest. Before you can harvest a crop, though, you’ve got to plant it. The trick to planting is to …

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Cattle

My niece collects cows. Well, images of cows, anyway. And she’s not the only one. Apparently, cows are hot right now. Personally, I’ve never been all that enamored of them. My encounters with cows have generally been unrewarding, from the time I tried to milk one (an experience neither of us enjoyed) to the time …

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Fertilizer

Just so I’m not operating under false pretenses, let’s get one thing straight: I don’t garden. I don’t seed, I don’t weed, I don’t plant, I don’t compost, and I don’t spread manure (this column excepted). My one connection with the plant world is mowing the grass, and I wouldn’t do that if I had …

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Wheat

The most amazing thing about this week’s topic isn’t the topic itself (though that’s pretty amazing); the amazing thing is that I haven’t written about it before. “It” is wheat, and how I’ve managed to go more than three years without mentioning it I can’t imagine, in view of the fact it’s as inescapable a …

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Biological control of leafy spurge

In 1987, when I was news editor of the Weyburn Review, I journeyed to a small lake near Maxim to photograph beetles infesting the pretty yellow-flowered plants growing on its steep banks (hey, the news business isn’t all politicians and other disasters!). Today, I’m told (though I haven’t had the opportunity to go see for myself), …

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Genetic engineering

Though the word “biotechnology” sounds very modern, what it describes has been with us for centuries–if you define it, as one science encyclopedia does, as “using biological organisms, systems or processes to make or modify products.” In other words, the first time somebody discovered the wondrous change wrought in grape juice by fermentation, or an …

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