Tuesday August 12th, 2014 – 11am
Posted Aug 12, 2014 01:17:54 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The second hour of the 570 Midday Show
11:00 Mark Wales, Farmer & President of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture
In a normal year, the frost that heralds the end of the growing season hits London about Oct. 8. That’s usually enough time for Ontario’s grain corn and soybean crops to mature. But with this year’s late spring planting and cool summer nights, a normal frost date might be too soon for many fields. Ontario Agriculture Ministry cereal expert Peter Johnson said the corn crop in particularly is vulnerable to the current weather conditions. “It is certainly not where we want to be,” Johnson said. “These cool nights are not helping us a bit, nor the cloudy, foggy mornings. It’s just not real corn weather.” It takes a couple of months for grain corn, Ontario’s second largest cash crop behind soybeans, to mature from the time it pollinates. In the London area, pollination is only happening now for much of the crop.
11:30 Brian Bethune, Senior Writer at MacLean’s Magazine
It’s a new day in the neighbourhood all across the Western world. More than 30 per cent of Canadians now say they feel disconnected from their neighbours, while half of Americans admit they don’t know the names of theirs. An Australian sociologist investigating community responses in the wake of the 2011 floods in Queensland found relations in “a precarious balance”; neighbours were hesitant to intrude even in emergencies-leading the scholar to conclude that “we are less likely than ever to know” our neighbours. Quite right, too: A recent poll of 2,000 Britons found a third declaring they couldn’t pick their near neighbours out of a police lineup. Yet it’s hardly surprising, given how lengthy working days, long commutes and having both parents in the labour force have combined with the way we raise our children to create suburban neighbourhoods that are empty more than half the day, with scarcely a neighbour to encounter, let alone recognize, trust or befriend. But, however powerful the economic and social forces behind the disappearing neighbour-and however positive many of its results-according to reams of new research, the transformation is also poisoning our politics and, quite literally, killing us.
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