Greetings Fellow Farmers!   

      Just wanted to show you the crop stage development of Ron's Canola field at Brandon.
The pods are plentiful and the top picture shows the color change.   Its important to check the seed color change before swathing canola.  Patience is a virtue (As in many things in life ) in timing your swathing ...  The right time gets you larger yield and better quality...  Too early can limit the size of the seeds and lock green inside the seed reducing the value...waiting too long can get you losses from shattering pods or bad weather that could blow your swaths all over the field ... or frost that could also make it low quality....         Things are looking good !

Sunday, August 16 was a great day !  Pugeni ( who many of you have met ) now lives in Winnipeg and works for MCC in Manitoba.  The Mennonite Central Committee has many CFGB tradional growing projects connected to it ... At a boring Blue Bomber game 2 years ago Pugeni stressed the need for MCC to have something like Kernels going to touch people connected through MCC who would like to help in raising crops.  I knew the perfect farmer for this and with a perfect location within 20 miles of the MCC offices... After some preliminary contacts in the spring Pugeni and I visited Grant Dyck of Artel Farms and after 2 minutes he said... (Just like Dragons Den)  I'm in !   MCC worked on their website and systems to accommodate and this year they launched the program... It is a clone of Kernels and has captured the imagination and Crop Input dollars of a lot of people in Winnipeg.  They are now connected with 6 churches and as of Sunday had 192 acres sponsored for this crop year.  They call it Grow Hope.  They also were pleased to get a prominent Virtual Farmer named Cindy Klassen to be a spokeman for the project.  She is an Olympian with many medals and she does things right!   She was so happy to help others in this way.   Some people have called Pugeni and I clones ( in our personalities at least ) and we were both super excited to see us become contagious and spreading this method of farming to a whole new denomination !  Grant is the other person pictured below.   

Grant Jardine

   Grant Jardine of Jardine Farms is one of our real Kernels farmers this year...
  Grant had a chance to help harvest Andrew Dennis' Kernels canola field a few years ago and has been an avid supporter all along...  this year he said he would seed 10 acres for us.   He is also already working on some neighbours to contribute this way in 2016 !...  His is a long term farm that has been feeding people for many years !  Thanks for lending your expertise to us Virtual Farmers and making a Difference to so many!

  Grant's field can be seen on the Brookdale Highway just north of Brandon.

Heavy Crop coming in Manitoba !

     A rough start to the season once again seems to be being ignored by the crops... most on the east 1/2 of the Prairies are doing just fine !  Even our Alberta Kernels farmers the Nelsons have great looking crops at Wetaskiwin.  Prices are coming down as the crops in the US and around the world are doing just fine too !

    This is a picture of the VanHeyst Kernels field by my elevator...  It made me think that there must be a really heavy crop coming !   (  Really they were just doing some maintenance on the pipeline that runs below the field)  
    The pipleline is also a good way of thinking of our Kernels  project...  We put in the resources at our end and refine it into something that is valuable and useable and feed people and enable them to feed themselves ... right around the world !   We get directly to places of need and most people don't even know it is happening !  Just like a pipeline,  working quietly all the time...  

More later !
Ray the Grain Guy