Reading Time: 7 minutes Let’s say that you are thinking about retiring but you have no family members who want to farm. If you’re like most Canadian farmers facing this prospect, you will consider just two options, either to sell the farm or to rent it out. Or let’s say you are thinking of leaving land to a family […] Read more
The Third Way
The Road To Volatility
Reading Time: 4 minutes Normally, a two-hour wait in a lineup of trucks at the elevator would have had me fidgeting. This winter it was was different. It was back in January, and I was going to be driving away with over $13 per bushel for the canola I was dumping. The grower right behind me wasn’t as happy. […] Read more
The Technology Treadmill
Reading Time: 4 minutes More than any other factor, technology has shaped and defined the productivity of today’s agriculture. Adoption of technology is the primary reason the average farmer today grows enough food to feed 140 people, up from about 25 in 1960. But it isn’t always an easy story. Technology is also the reason why real prices of […] Read more
Basis For Change
Reading Time: 5 minutes In these volatile times, cost control is essential. Unfortunately, there’s a whole category of costs that are hard for growers to manage. They’re post-harvest costs, including elevation, freight, inspection fees, storage costs, and other grain-handling fees, and on most grain sales, they’re virtually invisible. Instead, they’re blended into just one catch-all — the basis — […] Read more
Promanager
Reading Time: 7 minutes In some people’s eyes, Trish Fournier isn’t a farmer. That’s OK by her. She doesn’t think she’s a farmer either. Instead, she’s a farm manager, part of a new generation of managers poised to revolutionize North American agriculture. In the U.S., 15 per cent of farmers have already turned their operations over to professional management […] Read more
If The Bubble Bursts
Reading Time: 10 minutes Her words were carefully chosen to avoid any sense of panic, and she delivered them in a flat, bureaucratic monotone. But on October 18, 2010, when U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chair Sheila Bair warned that the rapidly rising farmland values may be the next asset bubble, she actually didn’t have to worry. Farmers and […] Read more
Where’s The Wheat?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Canada may have been the world’s leading exporter of wheat through the 1920s but to anyone farming in the West today, that seems like a very, very long time ago. We have almost forgotten that for decades, wheat was the reason we called the Prairies the breadbasket of the world. Or that around the globe, […] Read more
Are You Better Off?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Finding a new use for any product will make its price go up. That’s just what ethanol has done, and grain producers especially in the U.S. are currently cashing in. University of Missouri economist Ron Plain predicts that because of ethanol, U.S. corn prices will average over $4 per bushel for the foreseeable future. Plain […] Read more
The Vanishing Middle
Reading Time: 6 minutes Everyone knows that the number of farms and farmers in Canada is declining. It’s a well-documented, ongoing trend. What few of us realize, however, is that it isn’t small farms that are disappearing the fastest. It’s our mid-size farms that are dying. The numbers from Statistics Canada are bleak. Between 1980 and 2005, Canada lost […] Read more
The Cost Of Making A Profit
Reading Time: 5 minutes Ask any farmer what the number-one problem is in agriculture and they will likely reply: “Low prices.” But is it really the low commodity prices or is it high costs which have led to the income crisis that the industry has been mired in for more than a generation? Many farmers equate productivity with profitability. […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
