Kate Helmore
Kate Helmore covers agriculture and food policy through a business lens, treating farming, inputs and food processing as strategic industries shaping Canada’s economic and trade position. Her work follows the money behind what happens on farms and in supply chains, explaining how policy, infrastructure and global markets affect producers, processors and exporters. She brings a consistent focus on system-wide consequences, using reported features and business columns to show how decisions on everything from tariffs to rail capacity ripple through the broader economy.
Agriculture and food policy as an economic beat
Helmore is the agriculture and food policy reporter at The Globe and Mail, a beat created to deepen coverage of the business and policy forces shaping the sector. Her author bio notes that in 2023 she worked as a Report on Business reporter, handling stories on microplastics in farming, Quebec’s pork crisis and Canada’s global dominance in pulses. Those topics show how she uses individual issues in production and food systems to explore competitiveness, regulatory pressure and market opportunity.
In a feature on how Canada’s grain gets to market, she walks through the logistics chain from prairie elevators to export terminals, framing it as a lesson for other exporters in how infrastructure and coordination underpin trade success. That approach is typical of her work: she starts with a concrete process or problem in agriculture, then pulls back to show how it affects exporters, lenders and policymakers. Her business coverage regularly highlights the role of specialized finance and institutions, as in a Business Brief where she recounts meeting the chief executive of Farm Credit and uses that conversation to explore agriculture’s push to regain its “global swagger.”
Trade, tariffs and Canada’s place in global markets
A major strand in Helmore’s coverage is the intersection of agriculture with trade policy and global competition. She has reported on Ottawa’s decision to impose a 10 per cent surtax on certain imports of canned vegetables, explaining how tariff moves aimed at trade disputes can reshape supply chains and costs for domestic producers and retailers. Her work on Australia’s canola re-entry into the Chinese market examines how a shift in one competitor’s access can threaten Canada’s long-held dominance in that crop, underlining the fragility of export-dependent business models.
Helmore also writes on the corporate side of agricultural inputs, including coverage of BHP’s multibillion-dollar writedown on its Jansen potash project. By focusing on potash, a critical fertilizer for North American farmers, she connects resource investment decisions to input prices and food production capacity. Across these stories, she treats trade agreements, market access and commodity investment as core business risks and opportunities for the agriculture sector rather than as distant geopolitical abstractions.
Climate, sustainability and farming systems
Environmental pressure and sustainability are recurring themes in Helmore’s reporting on agriculture. Her author bio highlights work on microplastics in farming, showing how her beat extends beyond market stories into the long-term environmental costs embedded in production systems. She has guest-hosted The Globe and Mail’s climate newsletter, introducing herself as the agriculture and food policy reporter and using the platform to delve into questions such as the climate impact of beef and livestock production.
Beyond The Globe and Mail, she has written on clean fuel incentives falling behind U.S. policy and the threat that gap poses, bringing the same mix of climate, competitiveness and industrial policy to a wider audience. Together, these pieces show that she treats climate policy, environmental regulation and sustainability standards as central business issues for agriculture, not as side topics. Her stories often connect technical questions about emissions, inputs and farming practices back to the viability and resilience of the sector.
Business Brief and analytical voice
Helmore’s Business Brief columns crystallize how she distinguishes herself on the beat, blending ground-level reporting with analytical framing aimed at business readers. In “Business Brief: What Ottawa can learn from Saskatchewan,” she writes in the first person as an agriculture reporter, then uses her observations to examine how federal policy could better reflect the realities and strengths of farm country. In “Business Brief: Agriculture wants its global swagger back,” she again uses a reported encounter with a sector leader to set up a broader argument about the industry’s ambitions and constraints.
Her public comments about the agriculture and food policy beat emphasize a goal of making The Globe and Mail the authoritative voice on Canada’s agriculture coverage, which aligns with the depth and frequency of her reporting in this area. The combination of narrative detail, clear explanations of policy and market mechanisms, and an explicitly economic frame gives her work a distinct tone within business journalism. For anyone tracking agriculture, food processing, trade and climate policy as business issues, her reporting offers a consistent, specialist perspective rather than general assignment coverage.
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