Reading Time: 7 minutes A growing number of financial advisors are talking a different language today than they were 10 or 15 years ago. Increasingly they see that the financial health of the farm goes way beyond the numbers on the balance sheet or income statement. They know those numbers are underpinned by some basic fundamentals that require sound […] Read more
A word about your farm
Financial fluency is paying off for farms who learn the lingo
Don’t retire — ‘rewire’
Retirement can be rich and rewarding. Or it can be deadly dull. The difference may be whether you connect with new resources and advisors
Reading Time: 7 minutes Some people can’t wait to retire. They have plans to replace the daily grind with more volunteering, more travel, more golf, more time with the grandkids, more time at the cottage, or whatever it may be that they don’t have the time to do now. But for others the thought of retirement is terrifying because […] Read more
Digitizing the farm
Digitization got its start with a focus on the agronomic side, but now you’re going to hear more promises of business benefits
Reading Time: 9 minutes Farms that go digital may find a myriad of wins that go way beyond just better agronomic and production planning. All that information can help at the bank too. It can also lead to better business decisions, and it can even help develop new partnership or succession agreements. Of course the agronomic decisions may be […] Read more
The retiring farmer
In the dictionary, to be “retiring” means to bow silently out. Now, one of North America’s top farm retirement experts, shares why it’s the wrong strategy for our older farmers
Reading Time: 6 minutes Retirement can be a daunting prospect for nearly everyone, especially if they have had a meaningful career. Still, the adjustment in agriculture really is more acute than in many other sectors. “In agriculture, we have the added problem of being tied closely to the land,” says Iowa psychologist, speaker, author and farmer Dr. Michael Rosmann. […] Read more
Going wide on corn row spacing
In this research, allowing more space for the intercrop has little or no effect on corn yield
Reading Time: 5 minutes Get used to a new term in corn production — “solar corridor.” The idea is to provide a wide enough row spacing to allow sunlight to reach intercrops such as clover and hairy vetch. How wide? How does 60 inches sound? Intercropping is attracting more interest from straight grain as well as livestock producers. Grain […] Read more
Prairie soybeans settle back
Three years of dry Augusts might make for good cereal harvesting weather, but leave soybeans struggling for pod fill
Reading Time: 3 minutes After a stratospheric climb early in the last decade, Prairie soybean acreage has been on a downturn for the past three years. Manitoba acreage rose from 520,000 in 2010 to almost 2.3 million in 2017, but fell every year since to 1.15 million this past spring. Saskatchewan followed a similar pattern, reaching 850,000 acres in […] Read more
A new farm story
Most of Canada’s farms got their start when previous generations of immigrants made sacrifices and worked hard to gain a toehold, often via truck farming. Is it still happening?
Reading Time: 9 minutes Bob Baloch has taken what he has learned about logistics and marketing from working in the IT world, married it up with his experiences of growing up on a family farm in Pakistan, and applied it to create a highly diverse and successful fruit and vegetable farm on 23.5 acres of land at Rodney, Ont. […] Read more
Corn hybrids still waiting to launch with farmers
Despite limited adoption so far, corn breeders continue to develop hybrids suitable for production across Western Canada
Reading Time: 5 minutes Four years ago we heard predictions of 10 million acres of corn in Western Canada by 2026, but it turns out that they have yet to launch on that trajectory. Grain corn acreage in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta peaked in 2017 and remained between 470,000 to 480,000 acres for the next two years. While this […] Read more
Building the chain
When should you give an expert chain-builder like Braden Douglas a call?
Reading Time: 7 minutes Farmers are expert at producing food. No one doubts that. Increasingly, farmers are also expert at finances and myriad other sorts of business management. Again, that’s beyond debate. But are you expert at launching startups too? It’s one of the big questions of 2020, when so many of the ideas that are bubbling up across […] Read more
Owning the supply chain
B.C.’s third-largest hog producers Charlotte and Bob Lepp thought they’d test the waters with a small step into retail. It’s led to incredible learning, and growth
Reading Time: 8 minutes It isn’t exactly unusual. Time and again, all across the country, and especially now with COVID-19, farmers have looked at what they produce and thought, “If only I could cut some distributors and wholesalers out of the chain, I’d get to keep a lot more of what the end-user actually pays for the food I […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
