Reading Time: 7 minutes Farmland’s reputation as a safe and profitable asset seems sure to draw more investment dollars into rural Canada, whether farmers are happy about the extra demand for their number one source of wealth or not. A look at Calgary-based investment fund Veripath Farmland Partners and its 90,000-acre row crop portfolio shows why. Farmland is just […] Read more
The story of high prices
Return on investment is driving a rise in farmland purchases by non-farmers that looks like it’s here to stay. Is that bad? Or good?
Low-clearance spraying
Startup company is beginning with weed mapping by drones, but sees a future for spraying by swarms of mini crop dusters
Reading Time: 4 minutes A well-funded Regina-based robotics and artificial intelligence firm sees a future in spraying with drones, potentially cutting herbicide use by up to 95 per cent. In the meantime, it’s working on a system of conventional spraying using information gathered by a drone survey. Dan McCann, founder and CEO of Precision AI, claims conventional spraying results […] Read more
Home field advantage
Of course exports are vital, but look how much our farms earn from domestic processors
Reading Time: 5 minutes Canada’s food and beverage industry, defined as all the activities involved in taking raw agricultural output and processing it into finished products for consumers, employs 290,000 people and provides about 70 per cent of all processed food and beverage products sold in Canada. The sector is Canada’s second-strongest manufacturing industry with economic activity of $117.8 […] Read more
On the same team
Is it too much to hope that farmers and processors will get better at working together?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Since food and beverage processors are the largest buyers of agricultural production in Canada, purchasing about 40 per cent of domestic farmers’ agricultural output, growth in domestic processing couldn’t help but be positive for farmers. At least, that’s the growing consensus in more university business faculties and in the head offices of more business associations. […] Read more
Rock solid: Can anything tame farmland prices?
Drought didn’t do it. Nor has the threat of rising interest rates
Reading Time: 7 minutes Land is in an investment category almost all by itself, says Steve Duff, Ontario’s chief ag economist. “Outside of GICs, there aren’t a whole lot of assets in today’s market that don’t have some downside risk.” It’s little wonder that other market watchers agree. Canada’s farmland prices increased by double-digit percentages every year from 2011 […] Read more
Rent-farming: How safe is it to bulk up your rental acres?
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s not at all out of the ordinary for producers who farm thousands of acres to rent way over half their land, and while this provides some flexibility, it also comes with some uncertainty. Aimee Ferre Stang, her husband and her in-laws farm a combined 8,800 acres of rented and owned land in Saskatchewan. “Between […] Read more
Pump on or plug in?
If the ethanol market collapses, global grain markets will sink under the biggest gluts in history. But don’t write your farm’s epitaph just yet
Reading Time: 8 minutes Everywhere you look, the headlines all seem to say that it’s inevitable. Electric motors are the future. The internal combustion engine is heading the same way as the horse and buggy. Make no mistake. Change is definitely on the horizon. In August, President Joe Biden signed an executive order requiring half of all new vehicles […] Read more
The wheat and the chaff
Is there a better way to tell what market news is valuable and what’s overkill?
Reading Time: 4 minutes It can be all too easy to fall down the rabbit hole. Internet news, social media, newswires, online publications, they’re all shouting for your attention with new articles, new production forecasts, new supply-demand data and new opinion columns. But how much of it is just noise instead of actually useful? In order to know what you […] Read more
A better market ratio
How many hours does it take to be a good farm marketer? And how do you know if you’ve got there?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Of course farmers want the highest prices they can get for their production. And of course they know they have to work at it. But are your neighbours putting enough effort into the marketing side of their businesses to achieve maximum returns? Are you? “Farmers and ranchers are absolutely not spending enough time on marketing as […] Read more
Keep the farm or sell?
Mom and Dad want to retire. What’s the smart move? Should you keep the land for the family, or sell and invest?
Reading Time: 4 minutes As farming parents prepare to retire, conflicting viewpoints can arise with their offspring over keeping the land or selling it. What’s the right way to go? Deciding whether to retain versus divesting the family farm may be the biggest decision that any farm family will ever have to undertake. There’s no right or wrong answer, […] Read more