“Pic of the Week”, January 3, 2020: The Bounty of Canada’s Great Plains

00 Prairie crops, Manitoba (16)

The great Canadian prairies (and their American counterparts) grow a lot of food.  More food than can be consumed in either country and which is then transported to destinations all around our hungry world.  The Canadian prairies extend from Alberta in the west, to Saskatchewan, to Manitoba in the east.

While driving across the prairies to visit my father in Winnipeg this past year, I made a point of randomly turning up a country road or two, driving a few miles to see what was there.  

One turn lead to field of corn.  Corn is not that common a crop on the prairies and this likely would end up as feed corn for livestock (less likely for consumption in nearby Winnipeg …

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“Pic of the Week”, August 24, 2018: A Disappearing Prairie Icon

elevator 1

Grain elevators, prairie sentinels, prairie cathedrals — all synonyms for the large structures that have dotted the Canadian prairies for more than a century.  I recall when traveling across the plains as a boy, you could spot these wooden towers at great distances — often 20 or more miles away — providing welcome relief to the otherwise flat landscape.  Each elevator was a storage facility that marked the location of a prairie town; the larger and more plentiful elevators were in a given location, the larger and more prosperous the town.

The business of the prairies is agriculture and mechanisms needed to be developed to get the bountiful grain crops to world markets.  After some experimentation with bagging the grain, it …

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