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
Mixed feelings
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
Payday
Reading Time: 6 minutes No matter what your age, or the ages of your family members, it seems there’s good reason to start paying yourself (and them) a wage, especially if you back it up with a well-structured system of bonuses. Farm financial advisers across the country report that more farmers are making the switch away from simply dividing […] Read more
TAMING THE DOLLAR
Reading Time: 5 minutes Three-quarters of the businesses that are hedging the dollar via Scotia McLeod’s Prairie Futures Group are farmers, and more are rapidly coming on board. Protecting against currency swings is hot for farmers at BMO Capital Markets too, and at other institutions as well. The volatile American dollar isn’t the only reason, although it is a […] Read more
Talk To Me
Reading Time: 7 minutes ig tractors, big combines, big bins. Everything we thought was progressive about agriculture was always big. So, if few of us expected that one or our most important technological advances would come from turning our clunky rotary-dial telephones into palm-sized communication devices that have many, many times the computing power necessary to land men on […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
