Reading Time: 3 minutes As we roll into 2025, I’m very pleased to be working with the rest of the Country Guide team. Years ago, as a field editor, I split my time writing for Guide and Grainews and learned much more from Tom Button than I can summarize in one column. He wanted to produce a magazine with […] Read more
Editor’s Note: Making it happen
Editor’s Note: See you at the airport
Reading Time: 2 minutes This is my last issue at Country Guide. Retirement starts today. It begins practically the moment I hit “Send” on this column. No one could work at this job without a sense of the magazine’s history and its deep connections to Canadian farm families over the past century. I routinely get calls saying, “I’m cleaning […] Read more
Editor’s Note: meet the new renters
Reading Time: 2 minutes By and large, Canada’s farmers have adapted to all the changes in farmland renting over the past several decades. This is very good news because a lot more change is coming. Not everything is perfect in today’s rental markets. There is never enough land, for one thing. And there’s never a perfect way — or, […] Read more
Editor’s Note: Leadership – yes, it is a science
Reading Time: 2 minutes So often when we’re putting the finishing touches on your next Country Guide, I find myself pausing and thinking, “If only we could get this issue into the hands of every Canadian… Imagine the impact if they leafed through even just this one issue and saw farmers as we see them all the time.” In […] Read more
Editor’s Note: The sweet spot
Reading Time: 2 minutes We know that our January 2, 2024 issue of Country Guide only begins to explore the “sweet spot” questions that you ask yourself every day. This was inevitable, we all know, because questions about right-sizing have moved to the forefront for today’s farm management… right-sizing the farm, right-sizing the equipment inventory, right-sizing the amount of […] Read more
Editor’s Note: Who deserves today’s farm?
Reading Time: 2 minutes The word “entitlement” gets tossed around a lot in agriculture. “Oh,” somebody has always said, “the kids act like they’re entitled to the best truck money can buy.” Or, “Oh, he acts like he’s so entitled to a voice in how this farm is run.” In 2023, we’re sensing the entitlement charge is getting bigger […] Read more
Editor’s Note: Will winter really be so quiet?
Reading Time: 2 minutes In its way, this may be the biggest surprise of 2023. It’s that there are so few voices out there promising to tell us exactly what the future of agriculture is going to look like and exactly who the winners and the losers will be now that land prices and net worths are so high. […] Read more
Editor’s Note: A journey for us all
Reading Time: 2 minutes As you visit the new Country Guide homepage, we hope you’ll get a taste of the changes we will be bringing to Canada’s national farm management magazine in coming months. These will be our most significant changes in 15 years, the year we adopted “Strategic. Business. Thinking.” as our tagline. We now think of that […] Read more
Hanson Acres: Dale gets a lesson: “Sisters are like that, but …”
It was his aunt on the phone, so Jeff knew his Mom would be surprised. And maybe worse
Reading Time: 5 minutes When Dale Hanson looked at his phone and saw it was his sister calling, he set his wrench on the workbench and answered. “Good morning, Margaret.” Her response was garbled. “What’s that?” he asked. “Are you okay?” She answered, but Dale still couldn’t understand. “Is something wrong with Aunt Margaret,” Dale’s son Jeff called over […] Read more
Editor’s note: Making the most of 2023
Reading Time: 2 minutes I was wrong about the bull run that made grain prices soar beginning in 2008. Will I get it right on the 2020s’ surge? More to the point, will you? Of course there’s that old saying that we’ve all heard too many times. The worst decisions get made in the best of times, it says. […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
