Corn Growing Moving To Canada

"The snow is piled waist-deep outside the Southern Manitoba Convention Centre as more than 400 farmers gather to consider the once-unthinkable: growing corn on the Canadian prairie.

At one end of the packed auditorium last month in Morris, home of the Red River Wild hockey club, an Ohio farmer brought in by DuPont Co. (DD) is making a presentation with a slide that reads “Ear Count 101.” At the other end, Deere & Co. is showing off tractors and other equipment from a booth while Daryl Gross explains planters and corn-dryers to curious men wearing seed caps.

Graphic: Canada Looks Ahead to Its Own Corn Belt

“This is here to stay,” said Gross, who sells CNH Global NV tractors for Southeastern Farm Equipment Ltd. in nearby Steinbach. His customers are increasingly devoting acreage to corn. “There are a lot of guys who are experimenting with it and looking at it,” he said.

Corn is the most common grain in the U.S., with its production historically concentrated in a Midwestern region stretching from the Ohio River valley to Nebraska and trailing off in northern Minnesota. It had been ungrowable in the fertile farmland of Canada’s breadbasket. That is changing as a warming climate, along with the development of faster-maturing seed varieties, turns the table on food cultivation. The Corn Belt is being pushed north of what was imaginable a generation ago."

I've seen this shift over my lifetime and saw it first hand on our trip across Canada in 2012.  Corn and soybeans in Canada!

I wonder what other shifts we will see?

Ed Winkle

The only good pictures I have of the province is from a little farm museum we found on the TransCanada Highway because we drove through a horrible windstorm in August 2012 that nearly blew the slide in camper out of the pickup truck bed!  They better have some standability in that corn and alternative ways of harvesting corn, which they do.