Reading Time: 2 minutes All of us can probably already list the events in 2015 that are NOT going to reshape our farms or make us look back a few years from now with pride that we were here at the time. Topping that list of no-shows is the federal election, scheduled for this fall. From east to west […] Read more
Editor’s Desk: Something about 2015
Editor’s Desk: If not now…
Canada's farm organizations need your participation
Reading Time: 2 minutes Canada’s mainline farm organizations are struggling for your support. They deserve another shot. That’s not based on their past performance. It’s because of the scale and the solvability of the challenges ahead. In other words, we’re at a point in history where farm organizations can make a difference, if they have good leadership. Those who […] Read more
Editor’s Desk: One boy at a time
Reading Time: 2 minutes As associate editor Gord Gilmour reports in the November 2014 issue of Country Guide, more women than men now attend our ag universities. I’m not being alarmist — at least, I hope I’m not — and I’m not a zealot for absolute gender equality in every job or every outcome. I note the irony too […] Read more
Editor’s Desk: Our farm advisers can do better
Many farmers are frustrated by the conflicting advice they get from different channels
Reading Time: 2 minutes There’s no question that much of the progress that farmers have made in the past five years has come from the quality of advice they have received. It’s impossible to weave an accurate statistical story of the progress agriculture has made since the bull market began in 2007, but I’m convinced that most farmers have […] Read more
Editor’s Desk: Who will the winners be as the farm sector evolves?
Reading Time: 2 minutes If you take Canada’s inventory of farm machinery and multiply its working capacity times an average number of days for seeding, spraying or harvesting, how many acres will you top out at? Can the average farm cover 20 per cent more acres than it is actually farming? Or 50 per cent? Certainly it’s more than […] Read more
Editor’s Desk: The bull is only sleeping
Reading Time: 2 minutes As Country Guide market columnist Errol Anderson (who returns next month) always is sure to remind us, commodity markets trade more on emotion than on fundamentals. Markets climb on a combination of confidence and optimism — and maybe a touch of greed — and they fall on fear. The same emotions drive the same cycles, […] Read more
Great expectations
Faced with their own succession crises, ag businesses are drafting tomorrow’s star players, like Pioneer’s Andrew Lauver
Reading Time: 6 minutes Across the country, agriculture has evolved at blinding speed. Today’s farms operate on a scale and at a pace that no one could have imagined 20 years ago, not to mention the sophistication of their financial and business management, or the sheer value of the assets they must command. It’s why all eyes are on […] Read more
Editor’s Desk: A hot time in the city
Editor's Desk
Reading Time: 2 minutes There’s nothing wrong with a fishing lodge, of course. Nor for that matter is there any reason to miss out on going to a golf course or cottage. I hope to spend some time there myself. But a summer without some serious time in at least one of Canada’s great cities can hardly qualify as […] Read more
Road map to growth
When U.S. farm adviser Family Farms Group came north to help Canadian farmers grow — exponentially — Alberta’s Mike Kalisvaart signed on
Reading Time: 6 minutes The Kalisvaart family knows first hand about the ups and downs that farming can dole out. When they started into the hog business just north of Edmonton in 1979, though, they thought they had it figured out. By the mid-’90s, they had doubled their hog operation, they were profitable, and says Mike, who grew up […] Read more
Looking for what doesn’t change
Reading Time: 2 minutes I’ve said it before, but it remains true. The big thing non-farmers don’t understand about farming is that so much of it hinges on decision-making. It’s one of the constants in agriculture.Farmers wrestle with more tough decisions in a year than many of their city cousins face in their entire careers, and not just because […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
