u/Klarenbach

The court-supervised marketing of Monette Farms' land (Swift Current operation, ~350,000 acres total) officially kicked off June 29. About 274,000 acres across SK, MB, and BC, appraised at nearly $1.04B, after an $829.5M loan came due, pushing them into CCAA.

Bids run through Sept 1; the whole thing wraps by Nov 30.

Curious what folks farming near these parcels think this does to local land values — reset, or will the volume keep a lid on prices? (Wrote this up for our prairie ag newsletter; happy to share the source links in comments.)

The ore-sorting story keeps getting more concrete. At Soma Gold's El Bagre operation in Colombia, a TOMRA X-ray transmission pebble-sorting setup recovered 4,216 oz of gold (~US$20M at early-2026 prices) from material headed for the waste dump, while producing a cleaner low-sulphide reject usable as construction aggregate. TOMRA reckons it holds >50% of the global ore-sorting market.

The bigger picture: for juniors with sub-grade tonnes and brutal capex math, sorting waste from ore at the mine face is how a marginal deposit becomes mineable — higher feed grade, smaller mill, lower energy/water. Caveat: it only works on physically chunky, separable mineralization; fine disseminated ore is invisible to it. Wondering whether folks are starting to underwrite ore sorting into junior project economics yet.

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Good example of ore sorting actually moving the needle. Soma's running TOMRA's X-ray transmission sorting at El Bagre in Colombia — pebble-sorting setup that pulled 4,216 oz of gold (~US$20M at early-2026 prices) out of material that was bound for the waste dump, while spitting out a low-sulphide reject clean enough to reuse as aggregate.

The broader trend is what's interesting: for juniors staring at sub-grade tonnes and ugly capex, sorting waste from ore at the mine face is how a marginal deposit turns mineable — higher feed grade, smaller mill, less energy and water. Caveat is that it only works on physically chunky, separable gold; fine disseminated mineralization is invisible to the conveyor. Anyone else seeing ore sorting show up in PEAs lately?

Interesting one out of Western Australia. Benz dropped Hurricane Camp assays at its Glenburgh gold project and, for the first time, tied Zone 126 and Zone 102 into a single shallow, potentially open-pittable system — 70m at 2.9 g/t gold from 214m (incl. 37m at 5.2 g/t), plus 56m @ 1.6 g/t and 49m @ 1.7 g/t. What caught my eye is the first-pass hole 400m+ down-plunge of Zone 126 still hitting the system on projection, which they say could roughly double the search space.

Worth tempering: the broader 6.1–7.3 Moz Glenburgh figure is a conceptual ASX exploration target, not a 43-101 resource, so it's a "drill it into existence" story, not a booked number. And the Quebec (Eastmain) asset is parked while WA eats the budget. Still — clean high-grade rock in a month where the gold price got mugged. Curious what others think about the open-pit potential here.

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Copper One Resources (formerly Giant Mining, CSE: CEXY) just spudded a diamond hole at Majuba Hill in Nevada — a past-explored copper-silver-gold porphyry — that it says its AI designed end to end (collar + azimuth), via ExploreTech's platform after chewing through the historical drilling, geophysics and geochem. It's the first of a ~10,000-foot program.

For two years AI exploration has been selling target maps. This is the next step: the model calling the actual hole. If these hit, the pitch is obvious — fewer dry holes, less wasted meterage, lower finding costs.

The skeptic in me notes: an AI is only as good as the messy historical database you feed it, "AI-designed" is becoming the new "district-scale" filler phrase, and the model can be confidently wrong. It doesn't pay for the assays either.

Genuinely curious what this sub thinks — is AI-designed drilling pricing in as risk reduction or as a discovery? (And for plain copper exposure people seem to default to COPX / CPER.)

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G2 Goldfields (Guyana, Oko / Oko-Ghanie high-grade gold) is being taken out by G Mining. Each G2 share converts to 0.212 of a G Mining share plus 0.5 of a share in a new spin-out, G3 Goldfields, that holds the earlier-stage ground. Premium's around 72%.

I actually like the spin-out mechanic — instead of handing the blue-sky to the acquirer for free, legacy holders keep a piece of it in G3. But you're still capping the de-risked ounces at the bid.

For folks who've held explorers through a takeout: do you prefer cash, acquirer paper, or these paper-plus-spinco deals? And does anyone think the broader junior gold trade (GDXJ) gets a lift from the M&A wave, or is it all just the $4k gold price?

Detailed write-up in the first comment.

Watching the G Mining / G2 Goldfields deal close this week and the premium is what stands out — roughly 72%, with G2 holders getting 0.212 of a G Mining share plus 0.5 of a share in the G3 Goldfields spin-out.

The logic seems straightforward: at $4,000 gold, producers are short of organic ounces and it's cheaper to buy a defined discovery (Oko West, Guyana) than to find one. Gold's apparently been more than 40% of all mining M&A this year.

What I keep chewing on: a 72% takeout caps your upside at the bid, and the real blue-sky now lives in the G3 spin-out. Curious how others think about owning potential targets vs. just chasing the next bid — and whether the junior gold complex (think GDXJ) re-rates off deals like this or just tracks the gold price.

Full write-up in the first comment if anyone wants the details.

Tungsten is suddenly the metal everyone pretends they always cared about, and there's a legit reason: China controls the overwhelming majority of global supply and processing, so every Western tariff, export curb, and defense-procurement headline pushes capital toward non-Chinese tonnes.

Fox Tungsten (TSX-V: FOXT — formerly Happy Creek Minerals) just kicked off a fully funded 20,000-metre drill program at its past-producing Fox skarn in south-central B.C. It's one of the only primary tungsten plays on the Venture.

Skeptic's footnote, because this is where it matters: "critical mineral" is the single hottest phrase in any 2026 news release, and 20,000m is a drilling budget, not a resource. Tungsten skarns are notoriously chunky and hard to model — I'd treat the macro tailwind as the setup, not the thesis, and wait for grades before the supply-chain slideware.

There's no pure-play tungsten ETF; REMX (rare earth/strategic metals) is the closest basket that actually carries tungsten exposure.

Does anyone here actually have tungsten exposure, or is it still too niche/illiquid to bother? Curious how people are playing the critical-minerals-ex-China theme beyond the usual rare earth and lithium names.

🪨 Gold spent this week getting whipsawed by the dollar — sub-$4,000 on Wednesday, back over $4,045 by Friday.

Through all that macro noise, Revival Gold Inc. (TSX-V: RVG / OTCQX: RVLGF) quietly pulled 14.9 g/t gold over 5.9m at the Joss area of its Beartrack-Arnett project in Idaho, and pushed known mineralization 240m deeper.

Here's the skeptic's footnote: one narrow high-grade hole is a headline, not a mine, and Beartrack-Arnett is a known quantity — not a fresh discovery.

The thing actually worth watching is that depth extension; more tonnes at grade below the existing pit is what moves the economics on a project this size.

If you want the broad junior-gold read rather than a single name, GDXJ is the basket.

Rio Tinto is one of the majors deploying Sandvik's autonomous drilling tech. The interesting part for the junior space isn't Rio itself — it's that the majors are the proving ground. The autonomy and cost savings that work at their scale eventually trickle down to the contractors and explorers, quietly reshaping which marginal deposits pencil out and which stay moose pasture.

Skeptic's footnote: "trickles down" is doing heavy lifting — major-scale tech takes years to reach a TSX-V explorer's budget. Directionally right, slow in practice.