Philip Shaw

At a certain point getting ready for harvest has an endpoint and that end point is when you finally start moving into a freshly ripened field of soybeans. So far that has not happened to me, but I have spent each day spending a few minutes going over the combine trying to anticipate anything that…

This past week has been a wonderful bit of weather across much of Ontario. We were inundated with bright sunshine and warm temperatures something that you couldn’t order up any better for maturing corn and soybeans.  Sometimes at this time of year when you get warm weather you can almost see the soybeans accelerating in…

I’ve spent most of the last week land leveling some of my wheat ground getting ready for crops in 2025. I plant corn and soybeans into a stale seed bed and land leveling is a very necessary part of that. Interestingly enough, this year has been terrible for getting it dry enough for primary tillage…

This week your loyal scribe found himself in Tobermory Ontario, which is at the tip of the Bruce peninsula in southern Ontario. It is about a 5-hour drive from my farm near Dresden and it not only provided the opportunity for some good swimming but also a good crop tour through the heart of Midwestern…

It has been a long and winding road over the last year for grain prices. As we look into September there is much lament in farm country about how low prices have gone. There’s even some talk about being at the bottom now versus the more traditional October.  Needless to say, nobody really knows except…

It is that time of year again. It’s late August and even in southwestern Ontario you can feel a bit of chill in the air especially when the sun goes down. It is the time when summer seems to be coming to an end even though we’ve got another month left. Usually in southwestern Ontario…

It is getting to be that time of the year. We are in the middle of August and the weather is benign seemingly creating heaven for all these soybeans to be setting pods.  it seems every year that we hope for a hot and dry “Dome of Doom” to descend in some other region to…

It has been another wet week here in southwestern Ontario with more rain predicted for parts east in Ontario as the remnants of Debbie are coming up from the American southeast.  It’s been a year where I’ve had little control over Mother Nature, and it’s been extreme.  I often tell my agronomist friends that fertility…

I always hate to see July go. Living in Canada where you wear a coat for about 8 months of the year midsummer is always one of my favorite times of the year. It’s a time where we can harvest our wheat in our shirtsleeves and not feel that cold sting coming from a north…

It has surely been a tumultuous last few weeks on the political front from the goings on down South. There is never any question that Canadians grow nervous living above the United States. What we saw was in an assassination attempt and then a sitting American president decided not to run again. Now it looks…