There's Good in Every Grain
 Today is Canada’s Agriculture Day where we celebrate the good food that is produced here in Canada by your hardworking farmers. In Ontario we grow close to 6 million acres of barley, corn, oats, soybeans and wheat.
Continue reading “February 12 is Canada’s Agriculture Day”
February is Heart Month and what a perfect time to learn about the risks of heart diseases and what you can do to protect your heart health.
Heart disease can often be prevented when people make healthy choices and manage their health conditions.
Continue reading “February is Heart Month!”
Ever heard the term GMO and wondered what that meant? Saw it online or heard people talking about it at a grocery store but wasn’t really sure what it stood for?
GMO is an abbreviation for a genetically modified organism, which is a crop that has been developed through genetic engineering. This is a precise method of plant breeding that allows a specific trait that is naturally found in one plant to be transferred into another.
Continue reading “What does GMO mean?”Each year Bell Canada has an annual mental health awareness campaign called Bell Let’s Talk that is designed to open the conversation surrounding mental health well being in order to remove the stigma.
There has been a focus in past years to bring light the mental health well being of Canadian farmers due to a study published by the University Of Guelph in 2016. The results were staggering:
Continue reading “Farmers most vulnerable to mental health illnesses”
I recently read a personal piece in the Financial Post written by a farmer about mental health on the farm. A 2016 University of Guelph study surveyed 1,100 farmers in Canada and found that 45 percent had high stress and 58 percent had varying levels of anxiety.
In June 2018, FCC (Farm Credit Canada – a Crown agriculture lending company) said that it had provided emergency funding to 67 families in just two and a half months, eight of which involved suicides In 2017, FCC provided funding to a total of 287 families, with only two involving suicides.
Mental health is about more than the circumstances of where we live, or what we do for a living, and the problem with growing mental health issues in agriculture in multi-faceted.
This year in particular, Ontario grain farmers faced an onslaught of issues that compiled on top of this complex issue: weather, commodity prices, crop issues, and changing world dynamics were all huge factors that affected this year’s grain outcomes.
Continue reading “Stress on the farm”