Reading Time: 2 minutes The facts seem arrayed all against our young farmers. Economics is no friend, especially the massive capitalization required to generate a living income. Social trends aren t helping either, starting with the fact that this is the first generation whose parents recognize they deserve a healthy retirement. In a way, the job is against them […] Read more
Is This The Last Generation?
Land Prices Change Almost Everything
Reading Time: 2 minutes Lobbying is underway for government programs to help farmers especially young farmers cope with the exploding costs of farmland. As just one example, Ottawa is being told it should open up new tax-sheltered trust accounts that would let existing farmers contribute funds that young farmers would then draw on for mortgages, with additional interest rate […] Read more
The Short And Long Of It
Reading Time: 2 minutes By selling $41.3 billion worth of crops, livestock and related products last year, Canada s farmers generated 2.6 per cent of this country s $1.57 trillion gross domestic product. In its turn, Canada s GDP accounted for 2.5 per cent of the world economy, which means that our farmers who do more than their share […] Read more
It’s Different This Time
Reading Time: 2 minutes You can agree with him or disagree, but I bet you’ll remember what Allen Lash says: “By 2030, it’ll be all over. Most of the land will be owned by a handful of producers.” Lash says today we’re seeing the beginnings of change on a scale that we’ve never seen change before. The consolidation of […] Read more
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivat Es Us
Reading Time: 3 minutes By Daniel H. Pink Riverhead Books 260 pages To think of it as the candle problem is to risk missing its point entirely. Worse, it’s to miss why the newest book from bestselling U.S. business writer Dan Pink might offer some of the insights that many farmers are looking for as they wrestle with career […] Read more
Going For The Dream
Reading Time: 5 minutes Yvonnick Jambon knows the danger point. You start with an iconoclastic new kid on the block like Nufarm. It’s highly entrepreneurial, it grows fast, and it generates an enormous amount of its energy out of its biggest asset — the fact that it isn’t the other guys. At first, growth looks sweet. But then comes […] Read more
The Way We Do It
Reading Time: 2 minutes Circumstances change. Values remain the same. It’s a great truth that farmers know beter than virtually anyone else. Yes, it was Shakespeare who wrote, “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man,” but it is the mind of every […] Read more
Here’s The Question
Reading Time: 2 minutes The biggest issue keeping farmers awake at night is whether our children have what it takes to take over the farm. There are many ways to answer the question. Indeed, we’ve written in past about some of the tests you can use, and we’ll write more about them in future. But here is something to […] Read more
News We Don’t Want To Hear
Reading Time: 2 minutes Politicians are going to let us down. Exactly when and exactly how hard isn’t yet clear, but our hopes are dimming more each day. Maybe we’re wrong. We don’t like forecasting doom, but at the very least it seems prudent to invest a bit of time imagining the potential impacts ahead. It now seems unlikely […] Read more
Beyond Belief, But True
Reading Time: 2 minutes If we believe only the things that are easy to believe, the future is going to take us by surprise. At least, that’s the line I took when I moderated a panel of farm leaders last month, where our job was to imagine farming in 2020. Here are just three predictions, with a word of […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
