Reading Time: 7 minutes There have been a lot of conversations about women’s roles in agriculture over the past few years. You’ve read many of them in these very pages. Here’s my conversation starter: if we had gender-neutral farms in Canada, what would that even look like in practice? Would it generate more and better opportunities for women? Would […] Read more
The gender-neutral farm
What can you do to remove gendered barriers and build a stronger, more resilient industry?
Could the future of farming lie indoors?
Innovation: The scale seems much too small, say farmers. But that may be its greatest strength
Reading Time: 5 minutes Outside of maybe the health care field, there are few sectors that are as innovative and changing as rapidly as agriculture. It’s what I’ll write about in this series of columns for Country Guide, because frankly, some of the technologies that are coming off the drawing boards are going to challenge the way we think […] Read more
Genuinely in business: How Dow Agro built its company culture
Guide Insight: OK, so it’s a cliché that business means people working with people. It’s also how you create success. Just ask Dow’s Brad Orr
Reading Time: 5 minutes Of all the global ag input suppliers, Dow AgroSciences has arguably changed the most, transitioning from a company whose Canadian presence was dominated by Treflan, a herbicide that nobody sprays today, into a diversified operation with a strong national presence and significant market share in crop protection, plant genetics, traits and more. There’s just as […] Read more
Wade Barnes’ new playbook
Guide Insight: What can farmers adapt from Wade Barnes’ trail-blazing success at Farmers Edge?
Reading Time: 7 minutes In an agriculture that is struggling to figure out what its future will look like, Wade Barnes may at least know how to get there. And, as his example seems to promise, knowing ‘how’ may put you on the path to knowing ‘who,’ which in farming is the question that will eventually answer all the […] Read more
Future farming
If you’re in the agriculture industry the prevailing wisdom is clear. Global agriculture has an enormous — maybe insurmountable — challenge ahead of it. By 2050, our global population will reach nine billion.
Reading Time: 5 minutes Big Idea Christophe Pelletier: The key challenge is going to be feeding the animals, not the people. Everything is so much more global and interconnected that there really is no such thing as a local solution to these issues — and that has implications all over the place. For example let’s look at the implications […] Read moreDebt load
When times are good, should you pay off debt? Or should you take on more debt to add productive assets, parlaying the strength of today’s commodity prices into growth?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Rémi Lemoine: I think one of the most important things it tells us is that the issue of farm debt is very complex and can’t be boiled down to simple, almost philosophical, statements like “Pay off debt during good times.” You also can’t read too much into numbers that cover the entire industry or entire […] Read moreBig Idea: Ag and the rest
If you just looked at the raw numbers, you’d think that agriculture is waning in importance in Canada. You might even think it’s an industry in decline.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Country Guide: Should we be concerned that agriculture seems to be slipping in its importance to the Canadian economy? At eight per cent of GDP, it’s not insignificant, but there are other countries out there — say Brazil for example — where agriculture retains a far-higher proportion. Al Mussell: As much as we all have […] Read moreA message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
