Reading Time: 6 minutes Are you a couch potato when it comes to talking to your family about critical farm decisions? The comparison isn’t so far fetched. In a way, family communication is a lot like physical fitness. Even the best of us have areas that need a little toning, while many more of us need to spend serious time […] Read more
What’s your communication fitness level?
What kind of meeting athlete are you? Check out this new take for meetings your family will be proud of
From raising hogs to farming shrimp
Who knew it would take five years of red tape before Paul and Tracy Cocchio could convert their hog barns into Ontario’s first shrimp farm?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Walking into Paul and Tracy Cocchio’s barn on a cold Ontario morning feels like a visit to the tropics, and rightly so, because the livestock the Cocchios are raising originate in decidedly warmer parts of the world. You might say the barn is a kind of greenhouse for the animal side of agriculture, with the […] Read more
Is it time to sell your land?
Have prices peaked, or will you regret taking the price you can get in 2015?
Reading Time: 3 minutes With the heat leaking out of ag real estate markets north and south of the border, you can almost see landowners starting to ease back in their armchairs, settling in for a good, long wait. As an investment strategy, in fact, that might be a wise choice. All eyes are on the market, wondering if […] Read more
Can American farms keep getting bigger?
Now even big farmers have their doubts and feel it's reached a tipping point
Reading Time: 5 minutes About three hours north of the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana Delta Plantation was the largest U.S. crop farm, working 100,000 acres. But that was only until 2005. Then the farm was broken up and sold. During a decade of its dizzying climb, Eddie Davis managed up to 34,000 acres for the company. It was easy […] Read more
A team approach to farm succession
Getting their advisers to meet and work together as a team is helping drive the Tilstras’ succession planning
Reading Time: 7 minutes When Ted Tilstra imagined his retirement, he knew that he wanted it to continue to include having a coffee around the kitchen table with his brother and nephews. Tilstra Bros. have been running their parents’ dairy farm in Dunnville, Ont., for nearly 25 years. Together Don and Ted are milking 100 purebred Holstein cattle and […] Read more
Farmers finding the right image
More farmers across the country are taking charge of their image, for the good of their farms, and the good of the industry
Reading Time: 10 minutes Located just 20 minutes southwest of Montreal, the farm looks a lot different today than when it was established by Elwood and Marie Quinn in 1982. It sounds a lot different too, which is just what they wanted. Thanks to Philippe and Stephanie Quinn, the farm’s second generation, the enterprise has been transformed from a […] Read more
The critical role of cost control on the farm
Guide Thrive 2015: Upgrading your planning, tracking and benchmarking processes isn’t always easy, but it can put you in charge of your farm’s future
Reading Time: 5 minutes Forget good luck. As a strategy, it obviously has its weaknesses. Worse, it takes your eye off the factor that really makes a difference — how good you are at tracking and managing your costs. If there’s any luck involved in that, says Drew Fowler of Eyebrow, Sask., it’s a word that never comes to […] Read more
The best farm advice
These five questions will help you be sure you’ve got the right business advisers for your farm
Reading Time: 8 minutes It’s not a bad thing to seek outside advice — as long as it’s good advice. No matter how smart you are, you can’t be aware of all your options and opportunities. We all need great input that we can ruminate on, evaluate and implement, and this great input must come from people we are […] Read more
Dealing with stress on the farm
Next time you dig into the farm books, be grateful for what science is learning
Reading Time: 5 minutes For the majority of farmers across Canada, 2014 started with a brutal winter and a brutal load of work, with snow to clear and equipment to thaw. Then came falling grain prices, thinning margins, and the race to be on top of absolutely every financial detail. In other words, if you believe in stress, this […] Read more
Inheriting the family farm as a gift
Succession in Agriculture: High land prices are driving innovation in how to distribute your land
Reading Time: 6 minutes Farming without some startup help from your family can definitely mean an uphill climb. But getting the gift of a farm inheritance isn’t always such a blessing either. Many farmers will tell you it would have been impossible for them to get started in the business if it hadn’t been for a “hometown discount” from […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
