Whisked away for a prairie farm weekend
Connecting consumers and farmers has become a new imperative. Research from the Ontario Ministry...
Read Moreby Owen Roberts | Jun 22, 2012 | Global, Guelph Mercury
Connecting consumers and farmers has become a new imperative. Research from the Ontario Ministry...
Read Moreby Owen Roberts | Dec 22, 2011 | Guelph Mercury
Price wars are being predicted for food in 2012, thanks mainly to imminent arrival of the latest big box store to hit Canada. But in a strange twist, that could actually end up working in local food producers’ favour. According...
Read Moreby Owen Roberts | Oct 31, 2011 | Guelph Mercury
As fall advances and winter approaches, weeds don’t look like much of a problem. But in Ontario and elsewhere, some of them are developing resistance to the same herbicides that would kill them only a few years ago. The...
Read Moreby Owen Roberts | Oct 3, 2011 | Guelph Mercury
We’ll vote this week for the people and the party we think will best serve Ontario’s interests for the next five years. Who will those people be? The Liberals and Conservatives are running neck-in-neck, and the NDP is a solid...
Read Moreby Owen Roberts | Sep 6, 2011 | Guelph Mercury
Our zeal for local food is making us look more closely at what we buy – isn’t it? Intrinsically, I think so. But new economic information from the U.S. makes me wonder if we’re reading stickers and labels. Last week, U.S....
Read Moreby Owen Roberts | Aug 22, 2011 | Guelph Mercury
It’s the nature of news—what’s hot today usually disappears tomorrow. Such was the case a year or so ago with the Canadian Field Crop Research Alliance, a coming together of field crop research interests in Manitoba, Ontario,...
Read Moreby Owen Roberts | Jun 6, 2011 | Guelph Mercury
Agriculture in Canada, not to mention the Liberal party, has taken a step forward with the appointment of Guelph MP Frank Valeriote as the Grits’ agriculture and rural critic. Besides the change in the weather, it’s one of the...
Read Moreby Owen Roberts | Apr 10, 2011 | Guelph Mercury
Leslie Carson is giving hospital food a good name. Carson, manager of food and nutrition services for Guelph’s St. Joseph’s Health Centre, was recognized last week, along with Rowe Farms, for being committed to quality local...
Read Moreby Owen Roberts | Apr 4, 2011 | Guelph Mercury
You might not consider the creation of an insurance program a historic day in your profession or trade. But consider the plight of an Ontario farmer. A single animal in western Canada gets tagged with having BSE, and the U.S....
Read Moreby Owen Roberts | Mar 1, 2011 | Guelph Mercury
I’m going to start buying a local food product from my daughter Alicia Huston and son-in-law Mark (pictured below) next year, in a 750-ml bottle that says Canadian Club. For the past five years, the Huston family farm near...
Read Moreby Owen Roberts | Dec 6, 2010 | Guelph Mercury
If we all ate what we should and exercised, we’d be healthier. There’s no shortage of warnings that tell us we’re digging our own graves by eating foods rich in fat and sugar, the kind we’ll devour in abundance over the...
Read Moreby Owen Roberts | Oct 18, 2010 | Guelph Mercury
Evidence is growing that the local food movement is picking up steam. According to the province, a recent Environics study shows 80 per cent of Ontarians say ensuring a local food source is very important to them. If you trust...
Read Moreby Owen Roberts | Oct 4, 2010 | Guelph Mercury
Thanksgiving’s eminent arrival (in Canada) gives us reason to consider the origins of the food on our plates, and recognize those who put it there. Sometimes it’s a farmer down the road or down the highway, and sometimes it’s a...
Read Moreby Owen Roberts | Aug 30, 2010 | Guelph Mercury
When stories about menaces such as giant hogweed and the western bean cutworm show up in Section A of daily newspapers, it’s time to declare the media is becoming more interested and aware of farming. I write about this...
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Owen Roberts is a faculty member in the Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communications program at the University of Illinois. As an agricultural journalist, he is the past president of the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists and a lifetime achievement award recipient from the Canadian Farm Writers' Federation. His programs and research papers have been recognized nationally and internationally through awards from the Journal of Applied Communications, the National Agri-Marketing Association, the Association for Communications Excellence, and others.