It’s no wonder farmers put such pride in their combines. There’s no feeling like the harvest season when every thing is working smoothly. Besides, today’s combines are beautiful feats of engineering — and as the new breakthroughs in combine technology show, they just keep getting better.
Reading Time: 3 minutes massey ferguson 9500 series Massey Ferguson introduced their Next Generation axial combines in August 2011, saying the new 9500 Series combines are the most productive and efficient combines they have ever offered. The 9500 Series consists of three models, the 9520, 9540 and 9560 from 313 to 460 max horsepower. At the heart of the […] Read moreMachinery Guide
We all make mistakes
Reading Time: 2 minutes For this issue, contributing editor Anne Lazurko interviewed McGill’s Henry Mintzberg — arguably Canada’s foremost business prof — in search of insights for managing a farm, which Mintzberg does have. But instead of telling us how farmers should copy all the good things that his corporate clients are doing, Mintzberg had a different message. Don’t […] Read more
Saving face on the Sideroad
Reading Time: 3 minutes I took the family to one of the neighbourhood parties at the Fisher place down on the River Road over the holidays. It was a pretty typical mix of farm and small-town families. The men stood in the heated garage, holding beers and moaning about the price of pinto beans and foliar fungicides. The women […] Read more
Big 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 moreMachinery Guide, April 2012
It’s all about speed, power and efficiency when it comes to today’s self-propelled field sprayers. In this issue, we take a closer look to find where those differences start.
Reading Time: 3 minutes Rogator rg900, rg1100 and rg1300 Rogator RG900, RG1100 and RG1300 sprayers are designed to move quickly and easily among a wide variety of crops, crop heights and field conditions. According to Rogator, their drive package also gives you more horsepower than ever before and matches it to the payload capacity, giving you more consistent […] Read moreThe end of summer
Reading Time: 2 minutes There won’t be any more recessions. I remember being told this by a good friend who has done all sorts of impressive things with Deloitte and who has all sorts of letters after his name. It was around the turn of the millennium, and his point was that economists had finally learned enough about the […] Read more
Reflections, April 2012
Reading Time: 2 minutes The Commissionaire on duty at Depot, the RCMP training academy in Regina, hands me my room keys. “Breakfast is at 6:45 a.m. and your course begins at 8 a.m.” My room, usually occupied by police cadets, is basic but comfortable. I don’t need the lock box for a firearm so I lock up my truck […] Read more
Trouble comes to the farm
Reading Time: 4 minutes Everything was ready to go. With another week or so of warm weather, the Hansons would be ready to start putting seed in the ground. They planned to seed as much of their 6,000 acres as they could get on to — anything that wasn’t still too wet after last year’s flood. The machinery had […] Read more
A farmer’s hierarchy of needs
Reading Time: 3 minutes In the same way that spring produces the first gin and tonic moments on the veranda and frog songs that waft up from the marsh in the evening, it also produces two famous lists on the fridge: those things which must be done and another that fantasizes what might be done if we had the […] Read more
Here’s why 2012 will be different
Reading Time: 2 minutes 2008 revolutionized our expectations for commodity prices but it didn’t put an end to sleepless nights on the farm. 2012 will see farmers taking more control. Here are three of the ways they’ll do it. 1. Roughly one-third of our farms have no successors. On another third, there’s a chance that the children might want […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
