Republished from our inaugural, April 30, 2018 issue of Farmtario
I hope you are enjoying your first edition of Farmtario. A lot of work has gone into planning and creating this new source of farm news and information for Ontario. Farmtario is a division of Glacier FarmMedia and even if you haven’t heard of us, you’ve likely run into us somewhere before.
If you’re getting Farmtario, you’re also getting AgDealer, a Glacier FarmMedia product, which you’ll now find tucked inside of our new publication. We know AgDealer is your favourite source of information for equipment and we’re happy to be its partner in our Ontario venture.
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We’re Canada’s largest publisher of farm news and information, with titles such as the Western Producer, Manitoba Co-operator, Country Guide and Le Bulletin des Agriculteurs. We have about 50 people who work creating content for farmers across the country. We believe that providing farmers with information isn’t just about publications, and so we also own Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show (COFS) and its sister outdoor show Ag in Motion in Saskatchewan. Stay tuned for some great collaborations we’re working on with the folks at COFS.
You’ll see Farmtario every two weeks in your mailbox, but I invite you to visit our website regularly and sign up for our daily email newsletter, which has news, crops, livestock, markets and equipment stories every weekday. It will be in your inbox at 7 a.m. Our sites are optimized for mobile viewing. We want to be available where you need us.
We also have videos on our site and check out Glacier FarmMedia’s podcast Between the Rows, with the news behind the agriculture news from across the country.
Print publications are challenged around the world, but we know that farmers still read them. We’re doing some experiments in our print publication, trying to present our farm news and information with some of the navigation cues and tools we now use on our websites.
Innovation in agriculture publishing is one of our core drivers at Glacier FarmMedia. It has to be for us to thrive into the future.
We also know that farming is one of the most innovative sectors in the economy. It makes for fun and exciting reporting.
Farm innovation is also taking us quickly into a new world of agriculture where sometimes expensive and sometimes suddenly inexpensive technology involving software, digital switching, sensors and new takes on traditional equipment make for difficult decisions on adoption.
This is the area where we plan to operate at Farmtario.
We’ll bring you news, and insight into that news, from Ontario and around the world. But we also want to provide farmers with the best information available on technology, data and where they intersect with people and finances on your farm. A good example is our cover story. The Strangs are experimenters, willing to take some risks to try out theories that they feel would ring true on their farm.
They’re taking the research, applying it on their farm, and then taking it to the next level. Farmers are an incredibly important link in the agricultural innovation chain.
In this case, as is true in other areas, such as cover crops and soil health, the innovative farmers are leading and the rest of the supplier industry and researchers are catching up.
For most farmers, the key financial decision is when is the amount of information they have from other farmers and researchers means they can say “go,’’ or “no” to a new innovation. That’s where we hope to help.
I’m proud and excited to be the first editor of Farmtario. If you haven’t met me before, I’ve spent my career in agriculture journalism and communications. I’ve spent my life in agriculture, growing up on a dairy farm in Howick Township, in Huron County, working in agriculture journalism and now living on a small farm northwest of Lucan, in the middle of the busy agriculture-driven jurisdiction that is North Middlesex.
Let me know what you think of Farmtario. I look forward to hearing from you.
