Reading Time: 6 minutes You don’t sit on the tractor while you’re augering grain thinking about your odds of getting a debilitating illness or calculating your chances of suffering life-threatening injuries. But that doesn’t change your risks. Farming is an inherently dangerous occupation. The latest data from Farm Credit Canada show that 72 per cent of producers have had […] Read more
If the unthinkable happens
An advance care plan can ensure health care decisions are made according to your wishes in the event you sustain an illness or injury
The deal with food distributors
By connecting with distributors, ambitious small farms are leapfrogging their way into bigger markets. Is this an opportunity for mainstream farms too?
Reading Time: 7 minutes At peak operation, Andrew Vogler was growing 50 different varieties of vegetables, selling at nine different farmers markets around Abbottsford, B.C., and delivering vegetable boxes to 200 customers in the lower mainland. In other words, his produce farm was a lot like a lot of other startups — a lot of energy was going in […] Read more
Are you a good boss?
Take our quiz to find out. The payoffs can be much bigger than you ever thought
Reading Time: 6 minutes You have a good rapport with your team. They mostly return season after season, and you have even started hosting an annual luncheon to reward them for their hard work. Even so, the farm doesn’t exactly do an employee satisfaction survey to tell you what your team members and employees really think of your leadership […] Read more
Cheers! Raise a glass to the farm-to-bottle trend
No one knows grain quality quite like a farmer
Reading Time: 6 minutes When sixth-generation potato grower Devon Strang had potatoes that were too small for retail sales, he used to ship them to a dehydrator to be turned into potato flakes. It didn’t exactly pay. “There are a lot of farms in the area growing potatoes,” Strang explains. “There’s an abundance of smalls and the (dehydrators) won’t […] Read more
Capitalizing on co-operation
Agricultural co-ops are chasing new goals with the times. Could it be time for you to join a land-trust co-op? Or a branding co-op?
Reading Time: 6 minutes At first, this example might seem on the edge, but it illustrates a bigger point. When Chris Bodnar and Paige Dampier started farming in 2007, finding affordable land was a major roadblock. So, as founders of Close to Home Organics, they purchased a share in the Glen Valley Organic Farm Co-operative, which provided them affordable […] Read more
Have a plan in place before it’s too late
What every farmer needs to know about health care directives
Reading Time: 5 minutes When the topic of estate planning comes up, the first notion that pops into our heads is how we will divide our assets after we’re gone. That’s important, of course, but an estate plan also include important documents like a health care directive that might be essential while you’re still alive. A health care directive […] Read more
Estate planning when you have no heirs
These strategies ensure your hard work in this world creates a meaningful legacy when you’re gone
Reading Time: 5 minutes If you’ve put off writing a will, you’re in good company. A report from the Angus Reid Institute has found that more than half of Canadians have no estate plan. Canadians who don’t have a will typically blame it on the high legal costs, but Bud Arnold, CPA and tax partner with Baker Tilly Canada, […] Read more
Five new trends in estate planning
It’s easy to feel like everything is under control. After all, you signed your will years ago. So everything is great, right?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Canada is in the midst of a massive intergenerational transfer of wealth with the owners of trillions of dollars in assets thinking they’ll pass all that wealth on to their children. Despite this historic handoff from one generation to the next, the Investment Planning Counsel reveals that few Canadians have discussed their investment plans with […] Read more
The pandemic paradox
These farms are growing their sales and they’re enhancing their connections with consumers, all because of the COVID-19 pandemic
Reading Time: 7 minutes It’s no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic broke critical links in the supply chains that have been helping virtually all farmers build tighter relationships with a non-farming public. But neither is it a secret that Canada’s growing direct-to-consumer farmers faced an even more urgent challenge when restaurants, food markets and other sales outlets closed and […] Read more
A focus on value, not price
Agriprocity’s Nicole Rogers is in the U.S. selling an export market plan most farmers north of the border balked at
Reading Time: 8 minutes In 2008, Nicole Rogers was living in Dubai and working as a trade attaché for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada when she connected with several investors in the Gulf region who wanted to purchase Canadian farmland. The investors wanted large tracts of arable land in the Prairies to grow wheat and pulses that can’t be grown […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
