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
How Ethical is Alberta’s Governing Party?
We should have seen it coming. The first inkling that controversy would dog Jason Kenney’s victory in the 2017 United Conservative Party leadership race came not during that contest but a year earlier, when Kenney ran for the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives.
On the evening of November 16, 2016, at ...
Inside the War Room
On the campaign trail in 2018, Jason Kenney promised that one of his first acts as premier would be to establish a “fully staffed, rapid response war room” to defend Alberta’s oil and gas sector. This was the cornerstone of his “Fight Back Strategy,” a massive shift in the tenor ...
Fates Intertwined
Line 9B. It’s not a fancy name. It doesn’t have the poetic ring of “Trans Mountain” or “Northern Gateway” or even “Energy East.” Yet the Enbridge 9B pipeline, for me, symbolizes the interconnectedness and interdependence of our country—and the urgent way we must come together to tackle the challenges we ...