Reading Time: 2 minutes Most of us barely know what our forelock is, let alone how to tug it when we bow to the lord and lady of the manor. Nor do we know how incredibly close we came to having a landed aristocracy in Canada. All of us do sometimes wonder, however, if we could be evolving back […] Read more
How low must we bend?
Review – Inside the Leader’s Mind: Five ways to think like a leader
Reading Time: 3 minutes Liz Mellon Financial Times $21 Reviewed By Tom Button, CG Editor We see them step out of their Lear jets or shake hands with presidents. We see them share champagne with movie stars, or open new office towers. But really, how different from you and me are the CEOs at the world’s top corporations? If […] Read more
Reading about you on Bay Street
Reading Time: 2 minutes I sometimes play with the idea of Country Guide publishing a series of business books based on the strategic insights we glean from the farmers in our stories. By that I don’t mean business books FOR farmers (really, that’s what we’re trying to do with every issue of Country Guide.) I mean business books for […] Read more
We all make mistakes
Reading Time: 2 minutes For this issue, contributing editor Anne Lazurko interviewed McGill’s Henry Mintzberg — arguably Canada’s foremost business prof — in search of insights for managing a farm, which Mintzberg does have. But instead of telling us how farmers should copy all the good things that his corporate clients are doing, Mintzberg had a different message. Don’t […] Read more
The end of summer
Reading Time: 2 minutes There won’t be any more recessions. I remember being told this by a good friend who has done all sorts of impressive things with Deloitte and who has all sorts of letters after his name. It was around the turn of the millennium, and his point was that economists had finally learned enough about the […] Read more
Here’s why 2012 will be different
Reading Time: 2 minutes 2008 revolutionized our expectations for commodity prices but it didn’t put an end to sleepless nights on the farm. 2012 will see farmers taking more control. Here are three of the ways they’ll do it. 1. Roughly one-third of our farms have no successors. On another third, there’s a chance that the children might want […] Read more
The Lean Startup
Reading Time: 3 minutes How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to CreateRadically Successful Businesses You can tell that Eric Ries has a lot of experience as an entrepreneur when he sums up his two decades in business by saying, “Our productive capacity greatly exceeds our ability to know what to build.” You can also tell that his will be […] Read more
Inoculant maker moves to “stacked” approach
Reading Time: 3 minutes This time the so-called "biological revolution" is here for real, says inoculant maker Becker Underwood, and it’s going to make a lot of money for everyone from individual farmers to the largest multinationals. In fact, Becker Underwood is forecasting its own global revenues will double within four years as mainstream farmers start buying more of […] Read more
Corn ethanol production seen hitting plateau
Reading Time: 3 minutes Corn-based ethanol’s dream days are over, says the chief economist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Starting this year, the industry will plateau at an annual output of 15 billion gallons (56.8 billion litres), marking the end of a seven-year growth spurt that saw its corn purchases grow by an average 500 million bushels a […] Read more
U.S. seen keeping crop price supports in 2013
Reading Time: 3 minutes Watch for leaks out of the U.S. Senate agriculture committee over the next two weeks to get the best fix yet on where the U.S. is heading with its next Farm Bill, slated to begin taking effect next January. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s chief economist Joseph Glauber says he will be pouncing on those […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
