I must admit that when I was younger numbers mystified and frustrated me.

In fact, my typically jovial grade six teacher finally lost his patience with me one day after hearing me say (likely with that distinctive snooty-dismissiveness only a twelve-year-old can conjure up), “Why do I need to learn this? I’m never going to use it.” (Insert pre-teen eyeroll.)

Even though twelve-year-old me was right for the most part (I feel so vindicated!), I have come to appreciate the extraordinary value numbers bring to the table, especially in a farm business context — which happens to be the focus of this month’s issue.

Humans in general have been finely attuned to numbers for millennia. In fact, the ability to conceptualize numbers came long before the alphabet and seems to be an intrinsic part of the human brain. And so, love ’em or hate ’em, numbers are an integral part of farming.

Leeann Minogue’s “Guide to financial ratios” article is a great starting point for new farmers and an excellent refresher for the rest of us. She walks us through three financial indicators that matter most to bankers and helps us see how understanding them can strengthen a farm’s financial future.

And Evan Shout’s piece, “Shifting tides bring change to agriculture,” reviews the financial non-negotiables when it comes to running your farm business. He also stresses something we often so easily (and understandably) forget: making decisions “with no emotions, just data.”

But it’s dang hard to make decisions without emotions as you’ll find out when you read our cover story “The transition trial.” The Vreeling family is not new to making big decisions with long-term and far-reaching consequences. But their most recent round of decisions required an extra level of urgency and “their ability to analyze, communicate, decide and move forward is unwavering,” writes Danielle Ranger.

Similarly, Maggie Van Camp’s article “How to talk about your farm succession estate plans” helps the now gen have important, emotion-free conversations with the next gen about farm finances and planning. “People often anticipate that sharing their estate plans will lead to conflicts, so they avoid them all together,” she writes. She says the idea is to aim for conversations with low to no drama — and to certainly avoid these big discussions at family holiday meals.

Early humans scratched tally marks on bones and clay tablets to help them keep track of an empire’s food stores. We might now use computer software programs and apps to help us keep our numbers straight, but the idea remains the same: we need to know the numbers to run a successful farm business.

Interested in finding out what numbers you should be keeping track of? Looking for tools to help you improve your farm numbers? Download the Numbers Toolkit today!

The post Country Guide November editorial: The now, the next and the numbers appeared first on Country Guide.

Quebec is no exception.

The answer in many rural parts of the province is health co-operatives.

The model was designed to relieve the overtaxed provincial health care system by meeting several first-line needs. But it hasn’t been — and still isn’t — an easy go.

I spoke with Amy Goodall-Tolhurst, founder of the Ici Santé health co-op, and Robert Brault, board president of the Co-op Ici Santé, about how this model of health care came into existence, how the co-op works and the services — and hope — it offers rural residents.

The beginning

As far back as 1998 Goodall-Tolhurst had been working with a health care program started through Howick United Church in Howick, Que., called parish nursing.

But as demand for health care in the region was getting larger due to an aging and growing population, “We got to a point after 10 years where the service needed to grow,” she recalls.

“We needed to offer more hours but as is often the case, we didn’t have enough money to cover the demand.”

While Goodall-Tolhurst was spending 16 hours a month on parish nursing, she also took a part-time job at a private medical clinic in Châteauguay, Que., about a half hour away. This type of health care setting provided insight on how that type of organization worked and what the challenges and expectations were.

“I said, okay, we need to try and combine something here, because people need the services. Some are willing to pay and for some it can be covered by their insurance. How do we make it all happen?”

In the early 2000s, she explored the model of health co-ops in surrounding municipalities to learn about how it might be applied in her region.

In 2012, the municipality of Howick conducted a study as part of its municipal family policy to explore how they could better support seniors and families. Subsequently, the embryonic Howick health co-op set up a meeting with local businesspeople, mayors and the local representative for Quebec’s national assembly, who was a major champion of the initiative. They set up a provisional committee and met every two weeks for two years. The committee also travelled around the province to learn from various established co-ops.

“We follow the standard model for health co-op development established by the regional co-op development organization, but you really have to adapt to where you live and what the needs are,” she says.

The structure

The Co-op Ici Santé (loosely translated as “health here”, meaning health care customized for the region) operates from two service centres (Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague and Howick) and counts 2,000 members.

Quebec health co-ops are grouped under the Fédération québécoise des coopératives de santé (Quebec Federation of Health Co-operatives). The FQCS has existed since 2018, and its 40 co-operative members are focused on filling the unmet needs of rural health services through preventative and curative first-line health care.

The provincial group of co-ops is made up of approximately 350 doctors and nurses and dozens of health professionals with expertise in physical and mental health.

To receive care at Ici Santé a patient is required to pay a one-time member fee of $10 which gets them a share in the co-op for life.

The patient is also supposed to pay an annual fee of $125. “This is where we need to adapt to our clientele,” says Goodall-Tolhurst. “Paying an annual fee enables the co-op to have an operating budget, but it has required a lot of persistence to get people on board with this. Those with fewer health issues interpret this fee as an expensive blood test. Well, maybe it is, but these are building blocks for the future of the co-op.”

Brault adds, “If you offer a service you have to hire the personnel regardless, whether there are two people or 10 who show up. That’s the reason for membership: it’s like an insurance. It costs $125 and maybe today you just need a blood test, but maybe tomorrow morning you might need a nurse to visit you at home. So, they have to understand that we have to hire that nurse and pay her no matter what.”

Goodall-Tolhurst says that the board chose to develop services progressively and carefully because “we cannot commit to things that we cannot do.”

Currently, she says the two big areas of health care that need to be addressed in the region are with young families and senior citizens. “Generally, everybody in between can cope with an emergency room or take action to improve the issue. They might not need it seen to immediately, as long as they can still function.

“It’s the parents who aren’t getting any sleep at night because their kid is crying, and it’s the seniors whose families become anxious because they’re worried or unable to be present for their parents. We want to support our seniors in their homes and accompany our young people as they navigate their roles as parents.”

She says the fit also has to work for health professionals. “Each professional has different strengths which brings a rounded dynamic to the team. And people raised in a rural setting often identify with the challenges of access to health care. For example, there was a nurse who felt she didn’t fit in an urban setting because she valued the rural life she grew up in and so she made the move to one of our co-ops.”

The benefits

Many local doctors refer their patients to the Co-op Ici Santé because a patient will get an appointment quicker than in the public system.

“Some doctors will call and say, ‘Listen, I’ve got an emergency here. I need to have this done right now.’ We will do our best to help the doctor get the patient taken care of,” says Goodall-Tolhurst.

Doctors who work in Quebec’s relatively newly established Groupes de médecine de famille (family medicine groups) enjoy what that organizational structure offers. By grouping together, administrative tasks are taken care of for them by government allocation. However, there are also obligations with this structure.

“Our approach is similar,” says Goodall-Tolhurst. “We aim to take the burden of administration and bureaucracy off the doctors’ backs so that they can do what they do best: provide care.”

Services offered at the Co-op Ici Santé consist of everything from blood samples to foot care; vaccinations to ECGs; tick, stitches and bandage removal; cryotherapy and much more.

A local resident can call the co-op one day and usually have an appointment the next.

One of their most important services is consultation. “The public system is difficult to navigate. If patients come to us with something we cannot address then we’ll work through their options to help them make the best decision,” says Goodall-Tolhurst.

The future

Goodall-Tolhurst, who has occupied all roles within the co-op — board of directors, administration, nurse, resource person — now occupies more of “a position with a title” rather than an active role because she sits on the federal board of co-operatives. She brings information from the provincial level back to the local co-op and feeds federal and provincial governing bodies information about what’s happening locally on the ground, such as what needs are required and where.

The biggest challenge is funding.

This is where Goodall-Tolhurst says they fall through the cracks. “We’re not a charitable organization, we’re a not-for-profit co-op. This combination excludes us from many grant opportunities. Historically, community investment is how our entire province’s health care system started: little villages encouraged people to sign on as members to build their hospitals. Businesses were solicited for donations. But currently, people are stretched very thin in terms of what they can afford.”

Brault says he knows that complementary services like theirs are helping to take the burden off the “big” health care system. “There’s 900,000 people on a waiting list to see a specialist in Quebec. So, there’s a place for complementary services.

“While we’re not able to offer all the services of a hospital, we can offer followups so that someone doesn’t have to sit in an emergency room for 12 hours for, say, stitch removal,” he says.

Goodall-Tolhurst experienced firsthand how important access to a local health co-op can be. “We have been told on several occasions that one blood test saved a life. In our case, my husband was able to receive timely treatment for prostate cancer thanks to early detection with a PSA test and he is now cancer-free.

“My goal when starting Ici Santé was to ensure the type of care I want to receive when I’ll need it. A co-operative model enables the clinic to improve their team approach at a local level. Our rural health co-op prioritizes its members.”

The post Rural health co-ops give a boost to Quebec’s struggling health care system appeared first on Country Guide.

But Country Guide — and your farm business — is about more than “just” business.

So, two years ago, Country Guide changed its tagline to “Your Farm. Your Conversation.”

Given the hecticness of running a farm, it’s understandable if you missed this not-so-momentous change.

Why the change? Because behind every on-farm decision is a conversation — in fact, many conversations — and we want to highlight the critical topics that form the basis of the myriad business decisions you make.

Every conversation — on the farm, in the field, at the tradeshows or across the fence — has the power to drive farm families, their businesses and the industry forward.

Even conversations far from the farm, like those in Matt McIntosh’s article “Will investments in defence benefit agriculture?” World leaders’ decisions on NATO spending commitments may seem unrelated to Canadian agriculture. But defence-adjacent investments in critical national infrastructure, innovation processes and communications could benefit your farm.

On a more technical level, conversations that happen in farm peer groups have been helping farmers up their game for decades. In “Do we still need peer groups?” Helen Lammers-Helps writes about a study that showed farm businesses that have been members of management groups have an operating profit that is 43 per cent higher than their peers, a return on assets that is 2.2 per cent higher, and a higher net worth.

Even conversations in small communities can lead to meaningful change. In one rural Quebec town, conversations between multiple stakeholders led to the formation of much-needed additional health care services, as you’ll read about in “Local health care for the win.”

And sometimes conversations must be repeated if for no other reason than to affect consequential, incremental change. For example, discussions around women in leadership in the ag industry. More specifically, whether our habit of thinking of leadership ability in terms of gendered parameters is what holds women back from roles for which they are adequately suited. There are four factors that contribute to the perception that women are less effective leaders: lack of fit theory, role congruity theory, expectation states theory and the think manager-think male paradigm. You’ll learn about these in my article “What makes a leader.”

If you’re the “now gen” — the current or exiting farm owner or manager — conversations with the incoming next gen have tremendous value. Believe it or not, there’s still so much that can’t be taught through a TikTok or YouTube video. Danielle Ranger writes in “How to develop a leader’s mindset at every stage of your career” that retiring farmers’ identity and entire world will certainly change at this point of their life, “but the opportunity to be a mentor and teacher to others … just might be the most important part. Your wisdom, wealth of experience and knowledge are the farm’s greatest asset.”

Country Guide takes its role as a conversation starter seriously. We want to help you think about business in new or different ways; provide advice from top advisors to help you make critical decisions; and share stories from your peers who’ve “been there, done that” so you can learn from their adventures (or misadventures). We want to instigate and inspire. Stir up that conversational pot as it were. Give you that little kick in the pants you might need to take the next step for your farm, whatever that might look like.

What important conversations are you having on your farm? What conversation topics do you think should be covered in Country Guide? Drop me a line to let me know at astewart@farmmedia.com.

The post Your farm, your conversation drives 140 years of Country Guide content appeared first on Country Guide.

As a curious journalist and a farmer who is a woman, I got to thinking about gendered perceptions of leadership.

Are there differences in how men and women lead? Why do women seem to be at a disadvantage when it comes to leadership roles? What factors contribute to someone being a good leader?

My research started with a 2014 meta-analysis (i.e., a study that combines the data from multiple previous studies) that investigated perceptions of leadership effectiveness in terms of gender.

Researchers found four factors that contribute to the perception (note the word perception) that women are less effective leaders: lack of fit theory, role congruity theory, expectation states theory and the think manager-think male paradigm.

Let’s unpack those terms and find out what makes an effective leader — and whether it has got anything to do with gender at all.

Think manager, think man

What do you think of when you hear the word “leader”?

Probably adjectives such as “assertive” or “decisive.”

Were you also picturing a man? Maybe you didn’t even realize you were until you thought consciously about it.

Certain leadership traits are traditionally associated with men, such as dominant, strong, competent or heroic. And so, when we think manager, we think man. Culturally, around the world, leadership traits are stereotypically masculine.

Andrea Heuston wrote in Leading Like a Woman, “Historically, men are looked to, to lead. We hear about the great examples of female leadership throughout history because they were the exception, not the rule.”

Virginia Schein, an international consultant and lecturer on the subject of gender and leadership, initially examined the think manager- think male paradigm in 1973. Three groups of participants were asked to rate 92 traits of a manager as applying to “men in general,” “women in general” or as more related to “successful middle managers.” Results showed that the correlation between characteristics of a manager were more often thought of in terms of male traits.

“People think that leaders are masculine and assertive. And so, men are more like leaders than women are,” says Alice Eagly, a social psychologist who studied Schein’s work, in a 2020 podcast from the American Psychological Association.

Factors limiting leadership

Gender stereotypes, whether applied to men or women, can be descriptive (beliefs about what characteristics someone has) and prescriptive (what characteristics people believe someone should have).

Either way, they tend to harm perceptions of women’s leadership ability far more than men’s.

Double standards create various sets of rules for different people resulting in unequal treatment because those rules or principles are unfairly applied in different ways to individuals. They create a snowball effect around stereotypes: someone is treated a certain way because they are a woman, others observe and emulate that treatment, and so the cycle continues.

Stereotypes also have the effect of enforcing the double bind and ideas around role congruity, lack of fit and expectation states.

• The double bind: In psychological terms, Merriam-Webster’s dictionary says that a double bind is “a predicament in which a person receives from a single source conflicting messages that allow no appropriate response to be made.” It’s a communications paradox where the messages women receive make them feel that no matter what decision they make it will be wrong.

Go ahead and take a quick commercial break here so that you can watch Nike’s Super Bowl ad “So Win”. This pretty much sums up the double bind for women in general, not just in sports.

• Role incongruity: Role incongruity is a perceived mismatch, or disconnect, between the characteristics people associate with women and the traits they feel are required of a leader. For example, research by John E. Williams and Deborah L. Best show that, globally, people expect women to be the more communal — warm, supportive and kind — and men to be more “agentic,” that is, assertive, dominant and authoritative. Many find it off-putting if a woman demonstrates those male characteristics.

The article “Women Leaders: The Labyrinth to Leadership” offers the example of Hilary Clinton. She’s skilled, confident and knows politics, but during the 2020 election people criticized her for not being warm enough.

In her book When Women Lead, Julia Boorstin writes about Victoria Brescoll’s 2010 research where Brescoll and colleagues found that “leaders in industries that are strongly associated with the opposite sex, say a female police chief or the male president of a woman’s college are more strongly penalized for making mistakes than are those in positions more closely associated with their own gender. When leaders made mistakes, women in traditionally male jobs were judged more harshly and seen as less competent than their gender congruent counterparts.”

Women can also generate a self-fulfilling prophecy: if they see themselves as incongruent with leadership roles they end up creating self-imposed perceptual barriers — even when others evaluate them as more effective. This leaves them “dangling between two opposing sets of expectations,” write Ginka Toegel and Jean-Louis Barsoux in “Women Leaders: The Gender Trap.”

• Expectation states: A 2024 research paper on www.gender.study outlines this theory as “how cultural beliefs about gender shape interactions within various social settings.” The theory explains how it’s not only an individual’s actions that affect their status with a group, but also societal expectations and stereotypes.

“These expectations, deeply rooted in culture, often affect how people are perceived in terms of competence, leadership potential and overall influence.”

Essentially, this theory helps us examine how gender influences social hierarchies, leadership and power dynamics in groups.

But as Boorstin writes, “The fact that female CEOs are unexpected and therefore underestimated often causes them to find their own ways to prove themselves and to create new archetypes of leadership.”

• Lack of fit: Negative expectations around someone’s performance stemming from a perception of unsuitability for the role (e.g., that women aren’t suited for roles/jobs which men have traditionally filled) create a perception of lack of fit for the role.

Organizations and businesses can use the lack of fit model to understand what processes drive gender discrimination in employment decisions (e.g., bumping someone up to a leadership role).

While these stereotypes and double standards create barriers, surprisingly some research shows they can provide an advantage for women: when a leader’s skills or abilities are viewed positively and as occurring in spite of some shortcoming (e.g., a woman is not enough), she is more likely to be perceived as possessing a high level of competence.

Leadership labyrinth

When it comes to leadership ability, many women have what it takes, and they know it. But Boorstin says they end up exasperated and frustrated because role incongruity, the double bind, lack of fit and expectation states put them at a disadvantage.

Despite all the influences and hindrances, however, women have developed a unique style of leadership that many men are beginning to adopt because they notice the benefits, both tangible (profits) and intangible (e.g., improved organizational performance via people development and participative decision-making).

Boorstin points to research that shows women are more likely to demonstrate divergent thinking, a growth mindset and non-hierarchical leadership, a.k.a. communal leadership or transformational leadership (as opposed to transactional). A transformational leader inspires others while a transactional style is more about reward-punishment. Psychologists have found that a positive approach that emphasizes the reward portion (i.e., transformational approach) tends to be more effective because it improves morale.

“Men can, and often do, find opportunity in these approaches,” writes Boorstin. “(Researchers) found that when male leaders acted the way female leaders were expected to act, that is, communal and co-operative, they stimulated more co-operation than if they acted in a male way. Communal behaviour fostered co-operation, and stereotypically male, authoritative behaviour squashed it … It is gendered construction of male leadership that is the issue rather than only the leader’s sex.” (Italics are mine.)

Women also have a high adaptability quotient. Boorstin writes, “Research provides clues about why women might be well equipped to lead companies through crisis; they center on the notion of adaptability. Whereas in the 1990s the business world replaced IQ with a fixation on leaders’ emotional quotient (EQ), researchers have recently found a more predictive indicator of business success: adaptability.”

And characteristics that can seem negative at first blush can play to a woman’s leadership advantage as well.

For example, Boorstin writes how the bias of “warmth” worked for women rather than against them when male and female entrepreneurs were pitching their businesses, particularly when that business was a purpose-driven company. The stereotype of women being perceived as warm benefited them with a boost in the overall evaluation.

Boorstin also writes about research conducted by UC Davis cognitive neuroscientist Mara Mather which found that when subjected to stress, men become more eager to take risks, whereas women take a more practical approach. “Women in stressful situations pursue smaller wins that are more attainable and will have less downside.”

Adapt or adopt?

Still, there are many subtle gendered characterizations of leadership and authority that penalize women.

Something as “simple” as using the words “pushy,” “bossy” and “condescending” were found by writing teacher and public scholar Nic Subtirelu to be applied to women and girls three times more frequently than to men and boys.

Eagly noted that women also aren’t accorded as much authority. “I can be using the perfect leadership style, but unless they are willing to go along with me, I’m not as effective. And so we know that women are undermined by people not according us much authority.”

So, should women adapt and adopt more masculine traits of leadership to prove themselves as leader material?

A 2022 article on The Conversation (bit.ly/418N00G) summarized research out of Montreal’s John Molson School of Business and the Stanford University Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab which explored, among other questions, “Do women need to adopt male traits and behaviours to be successful in business?”

The study revealed that a low number of female respondents (24 per cent) and male respondents (17 per cent) from Quebec think that female leaders become more masculine to progress in their careers. But when researchers looked to their European counterparts (France, Germany and Italy), 46 per cent of women and 47 per cent of men shared this belief.

“This low feeling of masculinization of Quebec women leaders is particularly important to point out, because it prevents certain leaders from becoming obstacles rather than role models for other women,” write the researchers. “Far from denying their femininity, the results of this study seem to indicate that women develop a leadership style that is unique to them.”

In her podcast interview, Eagly said, “If you’re very assertive, so you say, ‘Well, okay, I’ll be just like a man’ — wrong. That doesn’t really work for women… (it’s okay to demonstrate some) qualities of being assertive… but not to go to the extreme, which is dangerous, but add to it the qualities of warmth and kindness and empathy. So, display both. That tends to be something that works for women who are leaders or wish to be leaders.”

And because the threshold of acceptable behaviour is often lower for women, a woman who adopts an assertive command and control leadership approach is often labelled negatively. This is referred to as the “abrasiveness trap” by Boorstin. When men demonstrate this behaviour, however, they’re usually seen as a leader.

Add to this Boorstin’s observations about the chicken-and-egg situation that gender dynamics create: “Women don’t seem good at hurdle races, because they don’t often compete at hurdle races. Therefore, bettors don’t back them and therefore women have less incentive to compete in hurdle races. Women don’t seem good at being CEOs because they don’t often serve as CEOs, therefore investors and board members don’t back them.”

In male-dominated industries, organizations or businesses (such as agriculture), one meta-analysis found that men were seen as more effective leaders than women. But there’s a paradox: if you haven’t seen a woman leader in a certain industry, how would you know the difference? A woman leader can’t be treated as an equal to her male counterpart until women in that position are normalized. But it can’t be normalized until she’s in those positions.

“It’s a chicken and egg obstacle,” writes Boorstin. “None of us want to tokenize female leaders, but until there are more women running businesses, the women who are in that position will attract additional scrutiny because they are rare.”

It comes back to the friction between people’s expectations and perceptions about what women can do and what they can actually do. “This incompatibility not only restricts women’s access to organizations but can also compromise perceptions of women’s effectiveness,” Eagly writes in her research paper “Female Leadership Advantage and Disadvantage: Resolving the Contradictions.”

Even though women may typically face more challenges than men in vying for leader roles, there are signs of change. Since 2011, some gender and leadership researchers have noted a partial shift toward androgyny (i.e., having both masculine and feminine characteristics) in the leader stereotype.

And Madeleine Baerg wrote in these pages in our December 2018 issue, “Farming excellence, we’re told, is no longer predicated on the farmer’s muscle strength. Instead, success is multi-tasking, management, problem-solving — areas where women excel at least as often as men.”

The key is self-awareness: understand your leadership style and silence the inner critic that has you underestimating your leadership capabilities.

Click here to read part two of this article ‘What it all means in the field (literally)‘ to find out how having more women leaders in agriculture could be economically significant for both the industry and at the farm level.

The post What makes a leader? appeared first on Country Guide.

We looked at how lack of fit theory, role congruity theory, expectation states theory, the think manager-think male paradigm and the double bind influence the leadership opportunities women miss out on. 

Now, let’s look at what the agriculture industry misses out on when these perceived leadership capabilities are taken at face value and push effective and skilled leaders — often women — to the sidelines. 

The numbers don’t lie

• RBC’s 2019 Farmer 4.0 report noted that by 2025 (now!), one in four Canadian famers will be aged 65 or older, and over the next decade 37 per cent of the ag workforce will be set to retire. 
  
  “Moreover, Canadian youth are not looking to replace them…. To seize these opportunities, Canada needs to transform the way we produce food. The Farmer 4.0 will be innovative (tests new approaches and works with new partners), highly skilled (embraces lifelong learning, with a focus on communications), data-driven and diverse (seeks a wide range of employees, partners, suppliers to solve complex problems)” — many of the characteristics that women typically excel at (and men are beginning to use more often) as part of their leadership approach. (See part one for more about this.)
• The 2016 Success for Women in Agri-Food report found that “there is an increasing trend that women are the key enablers to farm diversification and increased financial sustainability of the operation.”
• The 2020 FMC Dollars and Sense Update noted that “women are more likely than their male counterparts to adopt farm business management practices … a previous D&S report (2015) showed that adopting farm business management practices is linked to farm profitability.”
• An analysis between 2002 and 2012 of 243,269 employees at 58,832 Portuguese firms found that people working for female leaders spent 1.4 fewer extra hours on the job per month, a difference of seven per cent. (Source: Do Employees Work Less for Female Leaders? A Multi-method Study of Entrepreneurial Firms, Olenka Kacperczyk, Peter Younkin and Vera Rocha [Organization Science, 2023])
• In a 2010 study, organizational psychologist Anita Williams Woolley and her colleagues examined working groups of two to five people (699 people in total) and found the proportion of women in a group was strongly related to the group’s collective intelligence, which is their ability to work together and solve a wide range of problems.
• Amy Novotney wrote in her 2024 article “Women leaders make work better. Here’s the science behind how to promote them”: “Decades of studies show women leaders help increase productivity, enhance collaboration, inspire organizational dedication and improve fairness. Decades of psychological research confirm when women are empowered to take on leadership positions, the effects can be metamorphic for everyone.”

And more positive news: competence stereotypes have changed dramatically over the decades.

In one 1946 poll, only 35 per cent of those surveyed thought men and women were equally intelligent, and of those who believed there was a difference, more thought men were the more competent sex. (Source: www.apa.org/topics/women-girls/female-leaders-make-work-better)

In contrast, a 2018 poll showed that 86 per cent of respondents believed men and women were equally intelligent, nine per cent believed women were more intelligent, and only five per cent believed men were more intelligent. (ibid.)

A 2020 meta-analysis by Alice Eagly, professor of psychology emerita at Northwestern University and a pioneer in researching women’s leadership, found that women are now seen as equally or more competent as men. The researchers looked at three types of traits — communion (i.e., compassion, sensitivity), agency (i.e., ambition, aggression) and competence (i.e., intelligence, creativity) — and whether participants thought each trait was truer of women or men or equally true of both. 

The 2023 Final Report: Expanding Opportunities for Canadian Agriculture by Understanding the Experience of Farm Women noted that “sixty-three per cent of respondents agree that agriculture in general would be better off if women were more involved in farm management.” 

And the latest numbers from Statistics Canada (November 2022) show that women in ag are indeed becoming more involved:

• Female farm operator numbers increased for the first time in 30 years (2.3 per cent).
• In 2021, 30.4 per cent of Canada’s farm operators were female, up from 28.7 per cent in 2016.
• About one in seven (14.9 per cent) one-operator farms in Canada were managed by female operators in 2021, up from 11.5 per cent in 2016.

Eagly writes in her research brief Once more: The rise of female leaders, “Despite evidence of the cultural masculinity of leader roles, polls have found attitudinal shifts favourable to women leaders. 

“For example, a frequent Gallup poll question asks, ‘If you were taking a new job and had your choice of a boss, would you prefer to work for a man or woman? The responses from the first presentation of this question in 1953 through the most recent poll in 2017 show a dramatic decline in the preference for male over female bosses, while indifference about the sex of the boss has increased considerably.” 

Ultimately, does gender have anything to do with leadership ability? It’s not so much whether there is a perceived gender difference in leadership but when and why there may be gender differences in perceived leadership effectiveness. 

So, it’s more about style than gender — but a style that more women, whether unconsciously or not, tend to use more frequently. 

And it looks like a style that could pay off big.

How women see themselves 

Research into perceived gender differences in leadership has explored the idea of how men and women rate their abilities as leaders (self-rating) versus how others rate them (other-rating). 

For example, the research paper Gender and Perceptions of Leadership Effectiveness: A Meta-Analysis of Contextual Moderators found that men rated themselves as significantly more effective at leadership than women (self-rating) while women were rated by others as significantly more effective than men (other-rating). 

“(T)he literature to date seems to oversimplify gender advantages in leadership,” the report’s authors write. “One of our key findings is that very different patterns of results occur depending on whether self- or other-ratings serve as the measure of leader effectiveness….

“(T)he extent to which the organization being examined was male- or female-dominated significantly moderated gender differences in effectiveness … male-dominated organizations (my note: e.g., agriculture) showed a tendency for men to be perceived as more effective….

“We found that for other-ratings, women were rated as significantly more effective leaders than men in business and education organizations … Our findings show that certain leadership roles (i.e., business, education) may also be seen as incongruent with men’s gender role, negatively affecting perceptions of their effectiveness … highlighting the impact role congruity theory can have on men as well as women depending on the context or situation.  

“When all leadership contexts are considered, men and women do not differ in perceived leadership effectiveness. Yet, when other-ratings only are examined, women rated as significantly more effective than men. In contrast, when self-ratings only are examined, men rate themselves as significantly more effective than women rate themselves. 

“(Such findings highlight the) shifting stereotypes of gender and leadership. More research (is required) to look at what factors explain why women are seen as equally or more effective leaders than men, yet they are not being rewarded in the same ways.”

The post What leadership means in the field (literally) appeared first on Country Guide.

Riddoch oversees crop protection at Fairwind Farms. “I manage the weeds — or at least I try to. It’s the job that everyone sees. They drive by, you have a bad field and everybody sees it,” she says with a laugh.

But what brought her back to the family farm?

“I first went to school for social work, tried it in the field, but I wasn’t a huge fan,” says Riddoch. “The farm’s always been — it sounds bad — but a Plan B, in my mind.”

Riddoch’s dad, Mark Lumley, runs the business side of the operation while Riddoch, her husband and two employees manage the day-to-day, hands-on work.

“It’s so rewarding. And getting to work with family, too, I feel lucky,” she says.

She notes that she’s someone who gets bored easily, so she thinks farming is a great boredom-busting job. And she says that each day she works with her dad, she learns something new. “I’m learning new stuff all the time, which some days can be exhausting, but every day is rewarding.”

In addition to corn, soybeans and wheat, they also grow sugarbeets, so field health, rotations, seed varieties, environmental factors and crop protection products all have to be carefully considered. “There’s a lot of variables that can affect your day-to-day, especially when you’re planting,” says Riddoch.

Ultimately, what does Riddoch think makes her good at her role on the farm? “I enjoy organization… I like to be organized with my day-to-day plan, where am I going to spray, what’s the most efficient way to do it. I just try my best to be as meticulous as I can be because I value our reputation as a farm. You’re spraying chemicals and it’s an important job, so I like to make sure I do a good job.”

Find out how Riddoch plans for each crop year below and listen to her dad, Mark Lumley, chat more about farm life at Fairwind Farms in his Country Guide podcast episode at our podcast page.

The post When Plan B Turns Into Plan A appeared first on Country Guide.

Glacier FarmMedia reporters and contributors from Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and Manitoba asked farmers about their election priorities, how represented by the federal government they’ve felt — and finally, if there’s anything they’d like farmers from other regions to understand about the issues they face.

In part four, farmers reflect on what they’d like farmers from other regions to understand about the issues they face.

Read part one, part two and part three.

For more election coverage, visit the Western Producer’s election page.

Ontario

Dairy farmer Davina Garner would prefer if there was a better understanding of the different pressures faced by farmers in the East versus the West. As the organizer of an all-candidates’ meeting on behalf of the Oxford County Federation of Agriculture, she believes there’s a wider range of farms in Ontario than on the Prairies.

“Plus I think we tend to be more limited here by red tape if we want to expand,” Garner added.

Garner’s biggest concern during the campaign is whether the parties’ efforts to tackle the perceived housing crisis will accelerate the loss of prime agricultural land in the province.

Pete Overdevest said it’s unfortunate that the news and culture of Toronto is often what Western farmers hear when it’s a completely different reality in Ontario’s farm country.

Matt Underwood suggested western farmers might benefit from knowing that most of their Ontario counterparts live in ridings that have stayed blue for several elections.

Alberta

Phil Constantin said producers across the country can all agree on many concerns in the industry.

“I think at one time or another we all face each other’s problems. We’re all facing droughts, we’re all facing floods. But I think the biggest thing is when we have a swing this big on pricing,” he said.

Constantin said the lack of competition in grains pricing is damning to the industry.

“We don’t have enough competition in the grain market at all.… We’ve lost Viterra to Bunge, so what do we have for competition? We used to have the Canadian Wheat Board, and we had farmers running it at the end and doing a great job, but they shut us down. Then they took all our assets and sold it to G3.”

Bryan Perkins sees Alberta agriculture as an export-first economy as opposed to other regions that can rely more on domestic consumption. In a global trade war, that is a worry.

“Our Western Canadian agriculture is very much oriented to export kinds of commodities. Certainly we use our products here in Canada, but a lot of the products — whether it be livestock or grains or oilseeds — are heavily exported,” he said.

“We have to be concerned about the supply managed sector having undue influence on trade negotiations,” he added. “I think it can be framed in a way, certainly, that makes it possible to still have that kind of program in place, but yet there needs to be respect for those of us who … are very much oriented to the export markets.”

Manitoba

Grain and oilseed farmer Curtis McCrae said he has a neighbor from Ontario who still farms in that province. Their priorities are very similar.

“We think a lot alike,” he said.

Manitoba is much more export-oriented than Ontario, he noted. Farmers there might not understand how crucial infrastructure like ports and railways are to producers in the West, and the magnitude of threats posed by strikes.

Quebec

No answer provided.

The post ‘Don’t equate us with Toronto news, culture’ Ontario farmers tell western colleagues appeared first on Country Guide.

Glacier FarmMedia reporters and contributors from Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and Manitoba asked farmers about their election priorities, how represented by the federal government they’ve felt — and finally, if there’s anything they’d like farmers from other regions to understand about the issues they face.

In part three of this series, farmers answer the question, “Do you feel represented by the federal government?”

Read part one and part two of the series, which look at farmers’ views on U.S. President Donald Trump, trade, the economy, and what the federal government can do to build a better business environment.

For more coverage of the 2025 federal election, visit the Western Producer’s election page.

Ontario

Ontario farmers Glacier FarmMedia spoke to felt generally well represented by their MPs. In all cases, those were Conservative MPs elected in ridings where agriculture is a significant economic driver.

“From Ottawa as a whole, though, I don’t feel the current government provides as much support as I would like to see for grain farmers across the country,” said Matt Underwood.

Brayden Older, a dairy farmer near Embro, says he “feel(s) like we’re rudderless right now.” He criticized former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for proroguing Parliament immediately upon announcing his intention to step down as Liberal leader. He also mused about the possibility that the nation could — if Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives win the election — potentially be led by three different prime ministers within a few months.

Pete Overdevest, who is on the Dairy Farmers of Ontario board, says the ruling Liberals made campaign promises in the past but failed to follow through once elected. He expects little better this time.

Overdevest and fellow dairy farmer Braydon Older shared the concern that if the Liberals secure a third successive victory the alienation due to lack of representation for farmers — particularly Prairie farmers — in Ottawa will rise to troubling levels.

Older wants to hear assurances from party leaders this campaign that supply management will be protected in any trade negotiations. But he admitted he worries that putting too much emphasis on poultry, eggs and dairy could leave voters in Western Canadian farm country feeling left out.

“We need to be united over the whole country,” agreed Overdevest.

Quebec

“The strongest element of a society is also its weakest link: its farmers,” said fruit producer and Bloc Québécois candidate Christian Hébert. His comments are translated from French.

“We can’t just pick up tomorrow and go. So, if farmers’ concerns are not prioritized in public policy, then we’ll be the first ones sacrificed. I find this very sad.”

Hébert said Quebecers unanimously support reciprocal norms — that is, that imported products sold in Québec must be subject to the same standards and requirements as Québec products.

“The federal government is not playing an adequate role in terms of control over products coming through the border,” he said.

Hébert said in recent years there have been several demonstrations in Quebec, other provinces and the U.S. about reciprocal norms.

Manitoba

Curtis McCrae said his biggest fear is that eastern voters will forget what has happened in the last ten years.

“We haven’t been represented as part of the country. We’ve just been where everything gets pushed to solve problems,” he said.

He said he’d love to see a government that understands the importance of primary industry, and the growth it can spur in the rest of the economy.

Scott Peters, who sits on the Canadian Pork Council, said representation has been okay at times. It can be difficult to get meetings with officials, but he understands they are very busy.

However, he said AgriStability has been toyed with too much, and programs have been cut — possibly because agriculture is poorly understood or forgotten.

Alberta

Hog and grain farmer Bryan Perkins said agriculture seems to get lost in the mix, while tariffs on other industries receive all the attention from the federal government.

“They’re spending a lot of time working on and being worried about tariffs and whatnot, but we’re here with 100 per cent tariffs on canola oil and canola meal and 25 per cent tariffs on pork going to China, and there just doesn’t seem to be a whisper on that,” he said.

“Yet, when there’s a 25 per cent tariff on automobiles or steel and aluminum — and those are all really important industries, for sure — all of a sudden there’s lots of government attention,” Perkins said.

China placed tariffs on agricultural products in retaliation for those Canada placed on electric vehicles, he said.

The post Canadian farmers’ view of the federal government differs by province — but not by much appeared first on Country Guide.

Glacier FarmMedia reporters and contributors from Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and Manitoba asked farmers about their election priorities, how represented by the federal government they’ve felt — and finally, if there’s anything they’d like farmers from other regions to understand about the issues they face.

In part two, farmers air their concerns about trade and the Canadian economy, and what the federal government should do to promote a better business environment. Read part one to see their thoughts on U.S. President Donald Trump and tariffs.

For more coverage of the 2025 federal elections, visit the Western Producer’s elections page.

Ontario

Crop farmer Matt Underwood is optimistic during this election that there’s a chance to overturn “the status quo” in Ottawa and begin promoting Canadian agriculture at home and abroad.

“There’s a lot of opportunity for our government to support farmers more,” he said. Examples could include a carbon tax exemption for businesses that dry grains and efforts on a global scale to facilitate export of Canadian farm products outside North American.

Oxford dairy farmers Pete Overdevest and Davina Garner want to see less red tape for farm construction and/or expansion.

Quebec

Fruit producer and Bloc Québécois candidate Christian Hébert said there’s a lack of support for small and mid-sized farms both at the provincial and federal level. His comments are translated from French.

“Support programs are abandoning this section of the industry,” he said. “The majority of farms in Québec and Canada are approaching this critical zone: they are no longer a small farm, but they are not a large enterprise either. Insurance and financing programs are not designed for them and innovation support programs don’t work.”

The sector also needs to look into the future and think about how climate change will affect crop production methods and insurance programs, he added.

Alberta

Grain grower Phil Constantin said programs like AgriInvest must be improved to help farmers keep their operations strong in today’s shifting global market.

“I don’t really want to be subsidized, but when this kind of stuff comes up, we need some kind of safeguard to help us out and maintain things,” he said. “They call it AgriInvest, but it doesn’t really work. I mean, you’ve got to qualify for it, and even if you do, you don’t see money until years down the road.”

Hog and grain farmer Bryan Perkins spoke about issues he sees in the world of the agriculture business and how the global marketplace is changing the way Canadian farmers do business.

“The uncertainties in the marketplace that are there, whether it be Chinese tariffs or the potential trade disruptions that might occur along the way from that, they’re causing turmoil as well,” Perkins said.

“The machinery we buy or the various inputs that we buy are all affected by this turmoil in world trade.”

Manitoba

BRM programs need to be improved, said hog farmer Scott Peters. “There are things that are happening, but it’s all within the same structure, and I think some of the structure is outdated and for sure not responsive enough.”

He noted that rural crime is an issue for hog producers. Peters said his barns have been broken into several times.

Peters also noted he’d like to see the federal government promote domestic processing and manufacturing.

Crop farmer Curtis McCrae said that government restrictions like the price on carbon and tier four emissions on machinery have made the economy weak.

“Hopefully the next government that gets in understands that we need to unleash our economic power,” McCrae said.

Egg farmer Harley Siemens said he’d like to see federal red tape reduced. He also said poultry farmers need better insurance against avian influenza outbreaks, noting the CFIA’s per-head payment hasn’t been updated in many years.

The post Canadian farmers reveal concerns ahead of federal election | Part 2 appeared first on Country Guide.

Canadians often lose sight of how big their country is — unless, for example, they get to rub shoulders with Europeans who are staggered by the time it takes to drive across a single province.

Canada is big — and with that comes the challenges of bridging different geographies and climate zones, regional cultures, languages, resources and economic needs.

Glacier FarmMedia reporters and contributors from Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and Manitoba asked farmers about their election priorities, how represented by the federal government they’ve felt — and finally, if there’s anything they’d like farmers from other regions to understand about the issues they face.

Here is what they said about trade tensions with the U.S.

For more coverage of the 2025 federal election, visit the Western Producer’s elections tab.

Ontario

Although the tariffs might not always be top-of-mind for Ontario farmers as they contemplate the April 28 vote, it’s never far from the top of the list.

“We’ve got a bully right now. And he’s got (Canadian supply-managed agriculture) in his sights,” said Embro area dairy producer Braydon Older. “[Donald Trump is] obsessed with it, and I don’t know how that can work out good for us.”

“It just seems that one day Trump can wake up in a good mood and lay off the tariffs and then the next day wake up on the wrong side of the bed and say ‘let’s tariff everyone’,” said crop farmer Matt Underwood from the Wingham area.

Underwood said the federal government should be softening the blow of tariff uncertainty by promoting Canadian farm products more globally.

“We need to make sure we’re open to working with more buyers,” he said. “That’s both for Ontario and for the West. We really need to be highlighting what Canadian farmers have to offer to the world.”

Quebec

Christian Hébert is an apple and raspberry producer near Deschambault-Grondines, west of Québec City. He’s also a Bloc Québécois candidate for the riding of Portneuf-Jacques Cartier. His comments have been translated from French.

He said the pandemic, climate change and now economic war with the United States have compounded the burdens on farms.

“The economic burden is so astronomic that youth consider themselves as the lost, or forgotten, generation,” he said. “I don’t want to be alarmist, but we’ve been experiencing this for the past forty years, and by “this” I mean the decline of agriculture.”

This year he’s seeing even more farms going out of business — some choosing to leave despite still being profitable, due to stress and exhaustion.

Alberta

Bryan Perkins owns a mixed pig and grain farm operation in the municipal district of Wainwright in east-central Alberta. Perkins said the on-again, off-again rollercoaster of U.S. tariffs is putting a strain on the industry and supports from the government may not be timely enough to help farmers who face hardships due to the trade war.

“There were indications by our current government that they want to do something through AgriStability, but the impact of that is well down the road,” Perkins said. “If there are benefits that might come from that, it’s months or years down the road. And we have issues now that are really affecting us at this point in time.”

Phil Constantin is a grain grower in Sturgeon County north of Edmonton. He said that although the U.S. tariff situation is harmful to the Canadian agriculture industry, he believes that President Trump is only standing up for his country.

“We do need to address this free trade agreement. These tariffs are doing nothing but hurting everybody,” Constantin said.

“And I know everybody is complaining about Trump, but I mean, the guy is looking out for his country. We need somebody like that for this country.”

Manitoba

Tariffs were the top concern for Scott Peters, a hog farmer near Steinbach in southeastern Manitoba.

“At any time it could change, so we have to be ready for anything,” he said.

Harley Siemens, an egg producer in south-central and southeastern Manitoba, said while egg farmers aren’t the ones in the cross-hairs, they are concerned that the supply-managed sectors stay in place.

“We still care about the system’s integrity,” he said.

Canadian dairy, specifically, has been a point of contention in Canada-U.S. relations, though Prime Minister Mark Carney has said dairy is off the table in trade negotiations.

Curtis McCrae raised the specter of Chinese tariffs on Canadian goods like canola oil and meal, peas and pork, which are typically thought of as retaliation after Canada placed tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles.

He said that if the federal government is going to use farmers as a “sacrificial lamb,” it needs to financially support farmers. “I can’t see electric vehicles ever overtaking agriculture as an economic driver of this country.”

The post Canadian farmers reveal concerns ahead of federal election appeared first on Country Guide.