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
On the same team
Is it too much to hope that farmers and processors will get better at working together?
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
Making a smarter deal for farmland
If farmers are so sharp at land buying, who do so many pay too much?
Reading Time: 9 minutes On most farms, it’s among the big decisions of an entire lifetime. Do you buy that farm down the road and take on all that risk? Or do you watch someone else farm it and mutter, every time you drive, “That could have been mine”? Either way, it’s harder than anyone outside of agriculture might […] Read more
Farmland rentals in Western Canada continue to rise
More and more acres are on the rental market, with land increasingly held by families exiting active farming
Reading Time: 8 minutes The number of acres of rented and leased farmland in Canada is going nowhere but up, and will keep being led by Western Canada, especially Saskatchewan and Alberta. “I would expect that we’ll continue to see more people renting land for a number of reasons,” says Farm Credit Canada’s principal agricultural economist Craig Klemmer. That’s […] Read more
Selling land by app
When you think of it, do we really need real estate agents in an era with so much technology?
Reading Time: 4 minutes “Find me an app. I’m going to sell the back 40.” Talk is starting to make the circuit that it’s time for automation to take over farmland wheeling and dealing, and it might not be that much of a stretch. As long ago as 2013, which is ancient history for electronic technology, a University of […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
