Reading Time: 5 minutes It’s a new dynamic. Today, crude oil prices and global currency trading are huge drivers across farm commodity markets, affecting prices much more than the spec funds, and often much more than simple supply and demand. Dr. Julieta Frank joined the Department of Agribusiness and Agricultural Economics at the University of Manitoba in early 2009 […] Read more
2006 The Year It All Changed
Fire It Up!
Reading Time: 6 minutes If you want to know what it’s like to deal with some serious energy issues, try keeping nearly one million square feet of space at a comfortable room temperature when the only thing between you and the bone-chilling -30 C of a Manitoba winter mere inches away from you is two very thin sheets of […] Read more
The Real Price Of Wheat
Reading Time: 6 minutes When wheat markets rally, it seems everybody pays attention. Yet a walk through a typical grocery store will often leave producers shaking their heads at the contrast between what the farmer gets paid and what the consumer has to cough up. As a farmer, it’s pretty hard to accept any blame for increases in the […] Read more
The Choice
Reading Time: 7 minutes Because machinery decisions have such a huge impact on cash flow and solvency, we tend to forget that these are actually decisions about per-acre production costs. Or if we do think of them as costs, we don’t think of them as rigorously as we think about other inputs, such as seed or cop protection. It’s […] Read more
Jump Start
Reading Time: 7 minutes When Jean-Pierre Blackburn stepped up to the microphone to announce a new federal program to help young farmers, he knew that what he was going to say would cause heads to nod in agreement all across Canada. “We all know that beginning farmers face many obstacles,” the federal Minister of State for Agriculture said, listing […] Read more
DON CAMPBELL MEADOW LAKE, SASK.
Reading Time: 3 minutes SEVERAL TIMES EACH WINTER,Don Campbell and his wife Bev leave the ranch they operate with their two sons and daughters-in-law in northwestern Saskatchewan. Their goal is to empower other producers like themselves to make positive choices. Their message to the farm families who attend their six-day workshops is that to be successful, you need to […] Read more
Don Janzen La Broquerie, Man.
Reading Time: 4 minutes THIS IS NOT THE STORYof a typical western Canadian farm, especially when you consider that HyLife is producing 1.3 million hogs a year, that it has 1,150 employees, and that it sells its branded pork products on four continents. Yet HyLife (which recently changed its name from HyTek Ltd.) is definitely at the forefront of […] Read more
Add Up All The Costs
Reading Time: 6 minutes Knowing your cost of production is the bedrock of modern farm management, so you’d think that it would be the one calculation that we would always have all the answers for. Indeed, most farmers probably feel they do know the answers. Probably you do too. So you shouldn’t have any trouble with these questions. It’s […] Read more
Are The Kids Ready?
Reading Time: 6 minutes When Scott Corbett’s students open their books to start their farm business planning, Corbett warns them they’re going to get their lowest marks of the term. He’s rarely wrong. Corbett knows this, in part because he isn’t so different from the students he teaches at the University of Manitoba’s School of Agriculture. A graduate of […] Read more
New Horizons
Reading Time: 4 minutes On the morning that Country Guide caught up with him, Leon Ternan was heading out to drive combine after he had worked on some bookkeeping and then made time to read his marketing newsletters. What other profession gives you this kind of variety? Leon says. Sometimes I am asked why I spend so many hours […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
