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
Payday
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
Got Your Smartphone Yet?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Rural smartphone sightings are already on the rise. As the saying goes, though, you ain’t seen nothing yet. In the next 18 months, the North American farm landscape is going to start looking like a scene from “Star Trek,” with chirping devices on every belt. Smartphones are putting more management power in farmers’ hands, wherever […] Read more
Yes, there’s life after farming. It’s just that it’s a lot more expensive than you think
Reading Time: 10 minutes Nearly all farmers get it wrong. In fact, Len Davies, a farmer and succession planner from Muirkirk, Ont., figures that 80 per cent of farmers underestimate how much cash they’ll need to pay their bills after they’ve retired, let alone pay for vacations or those new motorcycles. It’s the same in the West, says Don […] Read more
PDAs emerge as Canada’s favourite grain-marketing tool
Reading Time: 3 minutes Market analysts and brokers see the trend to BlackBerry marketing picking up even more steam now that it has reached a critical mass of farmers. “You sit around with a group of farmers now and three-quarters of them have a BlackBerry or text messaging,” said John Duvenaud, publisher of the Winnipeg-based Wild Oats Grain Market […] Read more