Reading Time: 3 minutes The popularity of renting farmland has risen in Canada in the last 30 years. In 2011, 61.5 per cent farmland was owned and 38.5 per cent was rented out, according to Statistics Canada. Proportionately, the West rents more, although rental levels were high across the country: 29 per cent in Ontario, 34 per cent in […] Read more
Rent, or share?
Innovative rental agreements are as cyclical as rental rates
Not dead yet
Reading Time: 5 minutes Speculation about the impending death of Winnipeg canola futures misses the mark, industry watchers say Winnipeg’s canola futures have plenty of life left, say experts who refute any predictions about the inevitability of a death watch for the market. A year ago, record open interest was being set in the canola market, but when June 2013 […] Read more
GF2 in the classroom
With GF2 grants, more farmers across the country are signing up for winter study
Reading Time: 4 minutes When federal and provincial governments unveiled their individualized slates of Growing Forward 2 offerings earlier this year, most farmers were busy in their fields. Now, with harvest more or less complete, more and more growers are showing interest in taking advantage of the numerous farm management and marketing courses on tap. Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Ron Bonnett says farm education has been positioned as […] Read more
Mixed feelings
Reading Time: 5 minutes Maybe a huge change in Canada’s land ownership really is underway. Certainly the time is ripe. The big money funds are desperate for a safe haven. Overseas interests are anxious to lock up production capacity, and investors everywhere are looking for a slice of what they see as agriculture’s windfall. Everything seems to back up […] Read more
Brave new skills
Reading Time: 8 minutes Growing up the daughter of a barber, every now and again Bette Jean Crews would hear the phrase “just a farmer.” When she married a grower and became a farmer herself, she understood just how misguided that phrase was. After 40 years of helping run an 800-acre family farm in the Trenton area of Ontario, […] Read more
Fair Versus Equal
Reading Time: 12 minutes Even with professional help, half the families that farm adviser Don Forbes meets can t get past what is emerging as an ever bigger obstacle in farm succession planning. How do you treat farming versus non-farming children? Ironically, while the issue has always been fraught, it used to be easier to deal with it when […] Read more
BIN THERE
Reading Time: 8 minutes It s a change you just can t hide. More and more farmers all across Canada are choosing on-farm bins as their primary strategy for value adding. At first glance, it seems an almost foolproof choice. You get the benefits of value adding without the costs of going into specialized crops, and without the risks […] Read more
The Tweeting Truth
Reading Time: 6 minutes OK, so you don’t absolutely have to tweet, but when you see how these farmers are using Twitter to do things that you’d like to do too, you’re going to start wondering For Stewart Skinner, tweeting is the great equalizer, and lets him go head to head against groups like PETA and the Toronto Humane […] Read more
All Over The Map
Reading Time: 6 minutes The odd thing is that machinery costs are very similar for farms across Canada, averaging 14 to 15 per cent of crop revenue. But if you pick any one locality — including yours — the costs of owning and operating farm equipment are all over the proverbial map. Machinery costs vary much more from farm […] Read more
What’s Your Strategy?
Reading Time: 3 minutes The advice sounds like bizspeak. I’m being told that if you want to make high-quality decisions about your machinery inventory, you need to think “strategically.” As if you wouldn’t ordinarily think about the health of your farm when making such big decisions. But Dale Kaliel means something more. Kaliel is senior production economist with Alberta […] Read more