Philip Shaw

July corn futures closed last Thursday at $3.73 a bushel.  That’s a world away from the sub $2.50 levels we saw last year.  However, it’s a world away from last February 22nd when the July futures price closed at $4.57.  What were we thinking then?  Was the sky the limit?  Did everybody have ethanol on…

Sometimes I take a pounding publicly.  Rarely do I give it out.  However the events of the last week seeing Canadian Auditor General Sheila Fraser trashing the CAIS program made me feel at least for the moment vindicated.  It is one thing for CAIS being a dog and wouldn’t work from its inception.  However, it’s…

It is no secret that I like to travel.  If I had my druthers, I’d take readers and listeners with me all across this world.  Yes, we do have a global market.  Seeing it up close at times makes it more real. However what glitters is not necessarily gold.  Last Sunday the minister talked about…

It has become in vogue to almost forget where we are as farmers within the current genre of our Canadian agricultural policy work.  Somebody said something about the “ethanol gold rush”.  It’s like the tractor parades, farm rallies and vitriol of 2006 never happened. It begs the question, where are we now?  Are things so…

Last year amidst the many farm rallies I’d often see some honey producers in front of me.  Both at Guelph and at Ottawa beekeepers came to tell their agricultural story.  With Argentinean honey being mixed with Australian honey and put on Canadian food shelves, they surely had a beef. In many ways the problem with…

I recently read about one soybean producer from Missouri who broke the world record for soybean production coming in at 139 bushels per acre.  I knew of that last year however reading this recent piece was a confirmation of that never ending technological ladder.  When you farm the never ending incentive to get more efficient…

Symbolism is big this week for more reasons than one. It is a week after a bloodbath in the grain markets.  Futures plummeted last week after the USDA came out with their prospective plantings report showing the largest corn crop since 1944.  Also too, it’s the first anniversary of the day your loyal scribe co-chaired…

By the time you read this, we’ll all know what the long awaited March 30th USDA Prospective Planting report will say.  There are two reasons for this.  One, the report comes out today.  Secondly, DTN has decided to edit my column another way, which means even though it is written on Thursday night as usual,…

It is the week before the big event.  What you say?  Next week at this time we’ll be on the brink of the one of the biggest USDA reports ever.  When USDA comes out with its acreage figure for on March 30th, we’ll finally know what’s being going on in the mind of the American…

Joe Fiorito is a Toronto Star columnist.  He’s big time when it comes to us scribblers.  So I was quite surprised last week when he mentioned Canada’s farmers.  In his column, “Listening To Our Farmers On the Row They Hoe” Joe Fiorito points out some of the fallacies of food production in this country. Fiorito…