Agriculture

  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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Our “cowboy culture” has deep historic roots and it is right that we should have a yearly party to celebrate, but it would be tragic if we allowed the tawdry make-believe of the Stampede midway [...]