Brian Oleson

Reading Time: 4 minutes During a taxi ride in Winnipeg a few years ago, I got to chatting about agriculture with the cabbie, a fellow with a farm background who had emigrated from the Punjab. We talked about yields, crop rotations, how different farming is in India, and land prices. The latter was the most remarkable difference in his […] Read more

Reading Time: 4 minutes My favorite heist movie is one which never got made — the Great Russian Grain Robbery. It’s been nearly four decades since the Russians pulled off this sting operation and although there was no gunplay or high-tech safe cracking, it had just about everything else — Cold War intrigue, secret international meetings, precision timing, worldwide […] Read more

Reading Time: 4 minutes Back in the late 1980s, I was talking investments with an old friend when it came out that he was averaging returns on his portfolio that were twice the rise of the Toronto Stock Exchange. I was a little envious. Yes, his father was a banker and, sure, he’d won his fair share of the […] Read more

Reading Time: 4 minutes Farmers believe in the virtue of hard work and you ask only for a reasonable long-term return on your investments in land and capital. Speculators are those nasty commodity traders whose greed knows no bounds and who are to blame for those destructive boom-and-bust commodity markets. Gamblers are pitiful fools who deprive themselves — and […] Read more