Reading Time: 6 minutes Trade disputes, extreme weather, political upheaval. You name it, it impacts Canada’s farmers overnight, even if it happens half a world away. Where will the next big shock come from? Looking backward is the best place to start. COUNTRY GUIDE asked three agricultural news hounds to retrace the last six months and name the biggest […] Read more
Where In The World?
If You Died Today…
Reading Time: 7 minutes Jolene Brown was looking directly at the panel of three who had just lost their farming spouses. Then she asked the question. “If you had one more day, what would you say, what would you ask and, what would you do?” Brown knew it was a tough question. She’s a popular speaker, farm business adviser […] Read more
Bump Up Asset Values
Reading Time: 2 minutes This year Canadian accountants will move to the international financial reporting standards (IFRS) for public companies. Meanwhile, private companies can choose one of two options — IFRS or Accounting Standards for Private Enterprise (ASPE). The acronyms seem bureaucratic, but the impact for farmers can be real. About two million private businesses operate in Canada, and […] Read more
Lease Longer, Lease Stronger
Reading Time: 8 minutes Canadian farmers know how to rent land. In fact, in 2006, they rented close to 65 million acres, and paid an estimated $2.6 billion for the privilege. Now, however, the buzz is all about long-term leases — which can make the standard one-year rental agreement look like child’s play. Long-term leases can have lots of […] Read more
The Power Of Parity
Reading Time: 6 minutes “Completely unprecedented,” is how Kevin Tink sums it up. “We’ve got a Canadian dollar that continues to bounce around parity, and the commodity prices are strong in virtually every category, even live cattle prices.” Tink is senior vice-president with Ritchie Brothers Auctioneers, and you’d think with surging commodity incomes and the new buying power of […] Read more
Lobby Hard
Reading Time: 7 minutes “Farmers are professional complainers,” Pierre Elliott Trudeau told Quebec agriculture students in 1979. “When there is too much sun, they complain. When there is too much rain, they complain. A farmer is a complainer.” Historians say Trudeau’s complaint helped the Liberal party lose the election that year. Either way, the relationship between politicians and farm […] Read more
Learning More
Reading Time: 8 minutes Some people are driven to learn constantly. Clearly at 54 years old, Dan Wester is one of them. In the last few years, Wester has taken extended courses from the George Morris Centre as well as executive training through Texas A&M University, and he has signed on for a multitude of workshops and seminars. And […] Read more
Sway
Reading Time: 3 minutes Kim McConnell has spent a lifetime exploring why you buy what you buy, and why you think what you think. As a farmer himself and as strategic adviser with AdFarm, McConnell can claim at least as much insight into what actually influences farmers — in contrast to what merely interests you — as anyone else […] Read more
COUNTRY GUIDE’S Influential Farmers Most 12 In Canada
Reading Time: < 1 minute In Canadian agriculture, farmers do the pulling. Farmers are the ones taking the risks, dealing directly with the repercussions, sharing their first-hand experiences and applying new technologies and business models. Leadership grows on every farm, as it does in other business sectors too. What sets farming apart is how farmers excel at finding the extraordinary […] Read more
PETER HANNAM GUELPH, ONT.
Reading Time: 4 minutes WITH THE PROMISE OFbiotechnology comes the reality that Canada’s farmers have to wait and hope that the huge multinationals consider the market here large enough to be worth their while, and they’ll put their genes in crops that we can grow. For Peter Hannam, that wasn’t good enough. In fact, Hannam sold the first Roundup […] Read more