Rural Rite
The day starts at the Cow Palace. Kids wearing shirts emblazoned with “Eat, Sleep, 4-H, Repeat” sit at round tables in white plastic chairs arranged on the arena’s concrete floor. Outside in the [...]
Agriculture
Agriculture
Meet the Minister: Oneil Carlier
AV: What does a typical week look like? I’m out and about a lot. The year before last I put 100,000 kilometres on my truck, just getting around the province, meeting producers, meeting [...]
By Evan Osenton
The Practical Locavore
My partner Dave often laughs with anticipation in our kitchen as he unpacks grass-fed short ribs and pastured chickens from the grocery cooler and reassures me that my culinary values trump his [...]
Better Beef
The hamburger looked like any other fast-food burger: one patty on a bun, topped with ketchup, onions and pickles. It cost $4.15 and was served in a brown paper pouch, on a plastic tray. The one [...]
By Sarah Elton
A Line in the Dirt
In January, Heather and John Kerschbaumer left their 7,500-acre farm near the mighty Peace River and flew to the Golden Nugget casino in Las Vegas for a conference about alfalfa. The [...]
By Alex Gillis
Alberta’s Most Unsafe Workplace
On June 18, 2006, Kevan Chandler entered a grain silo on the Tongue Creek Feeders lot, near High River. Grain had encrusted the sidewall of silo number seven—a building 90 feet high and 30 feet [...]
Buzzkill
In the opening chapter of her 1962 environmental classic, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson wrote, “The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no [...]
Deep Roots
In October 2008, in a crowded speedskating oval in Torino, Italy, I spent five days in elbow-to-elbow conversation about food. This was no surprise—in Europe, “food” is routinely used in the same [...]
United We Farm
It’s been called the best-known brand in rural Alberta: the simple orange-and-green logo marking the site of local UFA farm and ranch supply stores. It sells everything from hog drinkers to chick [...]
By Donna Balkan
On Its Last Legs?
Scenes of rolling pasture, grazing cattle and towering mountains are quintessentially Albertan; in the south of the province, west of Pincher Creek, High River or Nanton, any tourist with an [...]
MOST READ
MOST READ
The Plans to Strip-Mine Coal in the Mountains
It looks like spectacular wild country, but some see it more as a big money sandwich.
The top layer of that sandwich is comprised of alpine grasses, forget-me-nots and stonecrop, glacier lilies and ancient, brave pines whose branches have been gnarled and weathered by centuries of wind. In summer, solitaires and ...
Can Climate Change Be Reversed?
When NASA initiated the Mercury Project that would send the first American into space in 1958, one of the many questions facing scientists was what to do about the carbon dioxide emissions of their astronauts. Our bodies exude about a kilogram per day of the gas, which is lethal in ...
Is a Carbon Tax the Best Way to Reduce GHG Emissions?
Jennifer Winter the assistant professor of economics at the University of Calgary says YES.
Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—and the corresponding effects on climate—are a global problem. Canada is part of the solution.
Let’s be honest: There are real economic costs from reducing emissions, and real economic costs from failing to do so ...