Reading Time: 10 minutes Once you decide it’s time to retire from farming, there’s a pile of planning, strategy and communication to fork your way through. Here’s how one couple from Saskatchewan proactively approached the sale of their seed farm, and how they captured value beyond piecemeal selling of their hard assets. Warren and Carla Kaeding and Roger and […] Read more
Selling the farm
Inside the sale of a modern, diversified and complex family farm
Where are the workers needed on farms?
Nine per cent of on-farm jobs are unfilled. Employees are scarce, and it’s going to get worse
Reading Time: 2 minutes Traditionally, farms used family, friends and neighbours to supply labour. However, as family size and rural population has shrunk, and as the size of the average farm has increased, our reliance on hired employees has multiplied. Today, farms often employ and manage a handful of people, and it’s also not uncommon for those employees to […] Read more
4 ways to structure farm diversification
Before rolling a new enterprise into the main farm, stop, think and talk about how this is going to fit into your operation long term
Reading Time: 8 minutes Maybe it’s something you just want to do. It might be manufacturing a new farm widget or selling birdseed, or producing heritage pork, or grazing sheep. Or maybe your son or daughter has graduated from agricultural college and they want to come home after a few years working off farm. You know there’s risk with […] Read more
Weather derivatives to mitigate weather risk to crops
These new risk-management contracts are finally getting easier to price and evaluate
Reading Time: 5 minutes Agriculture may be the most weather-impacted industry on the planet — by far — but it isn’t the only industry that’s affected by the vagaries of temperature and rain. It’s estimated that a third of the United States’ GDP and 70 per cent of firms in the United Kingdom are also exposed to weather risk. […] Read more
The new way into farming
After 10 years on the farm, these top graduates have succeeded by transitioning their family farms from conventional to holistic
Reading Time: 9 minutes A decade ago, a fresh-faced group of graduates jumped into a grain industry beaten down by prices and Prairie drought, and a livestock industry ravaged by the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) debacle. It was hardly the best of times. By the end of 2004, a year and a half after the BSE crisis began, Canadian […] Read more
A retirement goal of Freedom 52
What’s the right age for Mom and Dad to step back? It might be a lot younger than we have traditionally thought
Reading Time: 9 minutes It is an early fall afternoon, and while their four young children bounce across this picturesque New Brunswick dairy farm, 35-year-old Joas van Oord and his wife Lisa talk about their dreams. In the barn, that same afternoon, the farm’s 58-year-old patriarch, Maarten van Oord shows off the farm’s new robotic milker, and as he […] Read more
Why nice guys do finish first
'Give and Take' looks at why helping others creates success
Reading Time: 3 minutes Give and Take: Why helping others drives our success By Adam Grant, Penguin Publ. Adam Grant’s approach to business relationships seems counterintuitive, like it would make you a suicidal little fish in a tank of big, hungry fish, but Grant sets out in his business bestseller Give and Take to prove that good guys really do […] Read more
Van Camp: Olive branches offered through new gaps in tariff wall
Reading Time: 4 minutes What do you get when you mix milk and eggs with a looming election? A “free” trade deal that gained major market access in Asia for Canada, but managed to keeps the tariffs for Canada’s supply-managed commodities. After all the barking from New Zealand, cows parading on Parliament Hill, tweets, heart-wrenching videos on Facebook, election […] Read more
Marketing crops in weather extremes
Other farmers use marketing to cut the weather’s impact on their farms. These farmers build on it
Reading Time: 8 minutes Across Canada, the late-summer reports were a wild mixture of good, bad and ugly. Crops seemed stellar in southeastern Manitoba, yet in parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan, late rains couldn’t undo earlier drought damage, while in Ontario, the outlook swung from excellent to poor based on late frosts and excess rain. In that context, Country […] Read more
The roads of Zambia
We’ve always known the country’s agriculture potential is massive. Now there are signs it is being opened up
Reading Time: 10 minutes Associate editor Maggie Van Camp travelled to Zambia through an International Federation of Agricultural Journalists investigation into the country’s challenges and opportunities. One farm was ultra-modern and 74,000 acres, she reports. Others struggle with basic subsistence. The future may need both. Driving to Nsongwe, Zambia from tourist-rich Livingstone is a tooth-rattling, 30-minute adventure through a […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
