Philip Shaw

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…

It is getting to be a bit like a broken record or for my younger readers the emoji that just won’t go away. This past week your loyal scribe actually avoided the heavy rain that Toronto got, but most of Ontario farm country got inundated with the same water.  The streets of Toronto were flooded,…

This past week the tortured planting season in southwestern Ontario came to an end as the remnants of hurricane Beryl swept through farm country. Your loyal scribe has been waiting to get a bit of a break this spring as each time I plant a crop it seems like it gets hammered by heavy rains….

It is not often that you see wheat off on the 1st of July in southwestern Ontario but that’s exactly what you saw this year. If it hadn’t been so wet earlier the wheat might have even come off sooner. Your loyal scribe started harvesting wheat today July 4th.   In my 45-farming career that is…