Reading Time: 2 minutes Here at Country Guide, we’re heading into our third year with our focus on the business of farming. We started down this path by listing three or four things that we thoroughly and completely believe about today’s agriculture, and we asked ourselves if we really do believe them, how should we make this magazine different? […] Read more
Are We Getting It Right?
Country Guide’s New Year’s Book List
Reading Time: 5 minutes Here’s a tough one. If you were going to design an ideal farm with an ideal farm manager, and you were going to spell out all the things they’d need to do in a year, how much time would you set apart for them to read? I know, I know… it isn’t an ideal world, […] Read more
Before You Expand…Look To Your Financial Statements
Reading Time: 2 minutes A bad decision can cripple a farm immediately and the effects may linger for years. With the cost of land and equipment increasing astronomically and with profit margins narrowing, you must carefully think through your expansion and growth options. 1. Manage your balance sheet to grow your equity Your balance sheet is a snapshot of […] Read more
Getting The Most From Your Advisers
Reading Time: 4 minutes As farms and agribusinesses get bigger and more sophisticated, there are not only new opportunities but also continuous and growing pressures on margins and on resources, both human and capital. Increasingly, this means drawing on the skills, knowledge, experience and in many instances, foresight and resources of others to meet these evolving needs. Success requires […] Read more
Country Guide’sNew Year’s Book List
Reading Time: 5 minutes Here s a tough one. If you were going to design an ideal farm with an ideal farm manager, and you were going to spell out all the things they’d need to do in a year, how much time would you set apart for them to read? I know, I know& it isn t an […] Read more
Down To Business
Reading Time: 7 minutes The last thing I expected at the Growing Your Farm Profits workshop was to cry. Farmers don’t cry, right? This seminar after all was supposed to be all about profits and business, not about emotions, but when I risked a sideways look at my six-foot-tall business partner, he too was blinking back the waterworks. Full-time, […] Read more
The Boom In Succession
Reading Time: 10 minutes Meet The Family It’s one thing to know you need to do a better job communicating. But how do you actually get started? When I ask her to tell me a skill that families need to manage succession, Tamara Fraser’s answer is researched and personal: “Communication is the most important thing.” Fraser studied farm succession […] Read more
FARMAGEDDON
Reading Time: 7 minutes By now we’ve all seen the reports and the newspaper stories. It doesn’t matter exactly which ones. They’re all more or less the same, starting with the “fact” that tens of billions of dollars of farm assets must somehow be transferred to the next generation of farm operators over the next few years. Is it […] Read more
Life Insurance Survival Guide
Reading Time: 8 minutes Life insurance isn’t complicated, but it is complex,” Paul Craft, a financial planner from Steinbach, Man. tells me. It seems he’s right. You don’t have to like talking about insurance in order to understand how it works and to see where there might be a fit for your farm. Designing the package, however, can take […] Read more
She Said, What!?!
Reading Time: 7 minutes Even the most business-minded farmers see their work as also a way of life, not just a job. But this somehow gets put on the backburner when it’s time to make some of the farm’s most important decisions. When it comes to succession planning, for instance, the temptation is to simply hope the logistics of […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
