Philip Shaw

It is cold in southwestern Ontario with some flooding taking place in my local area. February can still be very wintry and I’m sure there is lots of it left. This coming week I will be flying to Ottawa to speak on the grain markets at the Eastern Ontario Crop Conference. I hope the wintry…

Recalibrating The VOM Discount Grain Economy Into 2019 In 2019 we are hoping for good things. I think I say that all the time especially on Instagram. Farming is always a challenging profession, but some years are a little worse than others. I’m sure if you were a cattle producer, you never wanted to see…

I returned from a short vacation last week, which took me partly through the United States. That always means that you have to clear customs, something that we do often here in southwestern Ontario. However, this time was different because American TSA agents, who were not being paid because of the government shutdown in the…

January represents a time when it is natural to shift gears. There is something about the change of the calendar year, which does that. However, one of my family member who is a historian often reminds me that the new year is really in March. He tells me that the Calendar Act of 1751 changed…

This past week we had some of the best harvest weather of the fall season. With winter arriving tomorrow there is still lots of crops to harvest in southwestern Ontario. Who would’ve ever thought at the start of the season that we would be going into winter with some soybeans still in the people. As…

I was reminded today during a production meeting at a local elevator that I should keep an eye on 2019 harvest prices. With new crop soybean prices pushing $12 a bushel and new crop corn prices pushing $5 a bushel, those are often thought of as magic numbers among our local farming community. I must…

This week my combine finally shut down as the last six rows of corn went underneath me. It has certainly been an eventful corn harvest here in Ontario as many of you have surely heard about our problems with vomitoxins. I faced those problems load by load and now they’re all behind me. That had…

I’ve written about free trade with the United States and Canada for over 30 years now. In fact, when I first started writing about free trade with the United States it was in the 1980s, and I didn’t really believe it would ever happen. Here we are 30 years later and Friday morning in Argentina,…

Corn harvest continues for me and it sure is a battle in 2018. I documented that last week just add a little bit of snow this week and cold weather. It seems the Canadian winter wants to come early. Of course when we’re not dodging the cold weather, corn farmers continue to experience the Vomi…

It has been a very difficult harvest season here in Ontario and your loyal scribe certainly has had my good share of the difficulty. Mother nature is the biggest villain as harvest weather has been about as poor as I can remember in recent memory. Its one thing to have a little bit of trouble…