Philip Shaw

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…

Today was another day in the harvest of 2018, which meant it was overcast with the threat of rain in the offing. It has been an incredibly challenging harvest here in southwestern Ontario. As November grows older there are lots of soybeans in the field at this end of the province. Corn is standing tall,…

I finished soybeans last week. I might also add a popular mantra in agricultural circles, just “in front of the rain”. Sometimes weather can be our bane of existence as farmers and that certainly has been the case over the past week in Southwest Ontario. Rain and cloudy weather has been a characteristic this fall…

Good weather over the past couple of weeks has helped me almost nail down my soybean harvest as of October 25th. Yields are good in the deep south west of Ontario. There has been substantial acres of wheat planted, albeit a lot later than many of us would’ve wanted. That is just the nature of…

Soybean harvest is in full bore for me now. It’s been a strange harvest season, early rains delayed everything, and then the best harvest days I’ve had have been overcast and cold. I’m due for some late fall 70 degree weather. Those days are always about the most beautiful you can imagine, but have been…

I am getting closer to harvesting soybeans. With another 2 inches of rain last weekend it has been quite a challenge to find dry ground and dry soybeans. It so happens that I farm some lighter sandier ground as well as my heavy clay ground. With the clay taking much longer to dry out, it…

It’s been a pretty tough past few weeks for Canadian agriculture. Of course, by now all of you know that we woke up to on October 1st, the USMCA, which stands for the US, Mexico Canada trade agreement. Some people here in Canada are calling it NAFTA 2.0. The American President is calling it one…