Corn Growers Looking To Rebound After Difficult 2019

Feb 24, 2020

The Manitoba Corn Growers Association (MCGA) gathered in Winnipeg earlier this month at CropConnect for the group's Annual General Meeting.

President Dennis Thiessen says last year was one of the toughest years in recent memory.

"In my 20 years of growing corn, I've never seen anything so difficult," he commented. "Probably the most challenging I saw was the guys trying to take corn silage off. They already had suffered from short alfalfa crops and the damage that was done to the fields was astronomical, really. We'll see some of that affected in the next crops from those fields."

He commented further on the 2020 season.

"We have a lot of crop residue out there. It will take a little while to dry the fields and to get on there and plant other crops. It will be a challenging spring for farmers, whether it's corn or any other crop. Weather will dictate our success in 2020 but we're always optimistic that things will work out. I remember 2016 was very wet, yet 2017 was a very nice spring and we got everything planted and the crops did well in 2017. We remain hopeful."

Click here to see more...

Video: Cleaning Sheep Barns & Setting Up Chutes

Indoor sheep farming in winter at pre-lambing time requires that, at Ewetopia Farms, we need to clean out the barns and manure in order to keep the sheep pens clean, dry and fresh for the pregnant ewes to stay healthy while indoors in confinement. In today’s vlog, we put fresh bedding into all of the barns and we remove manure from the first groups of ewes due to lamb so that they are all ready for lambs being born in the next few days. Also, in preparation for lambing, we moved one of the sorting chutes to the Coveralls with the replacement ewe lambs. This allows us to do sorting and vaccines more easily with them while the barnyard is snow covered and hard to move sheep safely around in. Additionally, it frees up space for the second groups of pregnant ewes where the chute was initially.