Largest ever Canadian farm auction

Highlights

A crowd estimated at about 4,500 gathered near Stockholm, Sask., 85 km south of Yorkton on March 24 to witness the largest single-owner farmland auction ever held in Canada. Eighty-three quarter sections of land and all the equipment needed to farm it (as well as a large amount of rented land) were sold....

With the amount of land and equipment that was being sold, people came from far and wide," marvelled Peter Kennedy, Manager of Ritchie Brothers Auction, which was consigned to conduct the sale.

Almost 1,700 registered bidders from seven provinces, 11 U.S. states as well as Germany and Italy attended the sale. There was also participation from more than 270 Internet bidders.....

The owner of the property was 45-year-old Don Gillen, who resides in Saskatoon. He had purchased the large amount of land just three years earlier. At the time, Gillen saw an opportunity in agriculture. But after the frost of 2004 and the struggle to take off a crop over such a large area in 2005, Gillen decided the risk was too much.

"After last fall I got thinking the potential of having things go a-miss was quite high. So I thought we have fairly new machinery, the land is in decent condition and may be attractive to others," explained Gillen, regarding his decision to sell out after only three years of operation.....

Full story Link

The Deadliest Catch

The Discovery Channel says its program last year, Deadliest Catch, on the king crab fishery in Alaska was the most successful series introduced in ten years. So naturally they want a repeat.

The new series, with the same name, starts on 9 Pm Tuesday March 28. In this new series the film crews accompanies king crab boats fishing in the fishing for the first time under a quota based fishery. The new series drama is more about fishermen, their luck, the skill of finding crab and the industry in general.

I don't comment much on made for tv stuff, but the past series did a tremendous job popularizing crab and fishing in general many people got their first impression of commercial fishing from the show.

Link to the series information

The Porky Fish Clone?

Researchers say they have created cloned piglets that are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, the oil that is prized as being beneficial to the heart.

A team led by Yifan Dai of the University of Pittsburgh's School of Medicine transferred into foetal pig cells a gene called fat-1 that had been identified in a well-studied lab animal, a tiny worm known as Caenorhabditis elegans. A worm that fish eat. The story is here

My Thoughts:

Creating transgenic hogs in an attempt to mimic the potential nutrition benefits of fish, somehow makes me think that science is ready to go a long way in creating the ultimate balanced diet in a "canned" food clone!

My mother told me to eat fish as part of a good diet! If she wanted me to eat pork alone she would have said so.

Why do we need to "clone" to create healthy food?

In order to help justify this work, it has also been suggested that fish are being over-harvested so we need to clone and change other animals to subsitute for fish?

HUH? Why not take a real hard look at practicing more fish farming using an eco-friendly manner, and forget about changing animals to be something that they are not! I can agree with the statement that wild fish stocks have been over harvested. Ancient people have farmed fish for thousands of years and in doing so, they created more supply by growing fish, not a changed animal. What is Aquaculture

In 2002, Prather's team created pigs designed to produce organs that were more suitable for transplantation into humans.