Reading Time: 4 minutes WHEN THE END IS THE BEGINNING While farmers are focused on the possibility the Earth will run out of phosphorus and nitrogen fertilizers, agriculture could be hit almost as hard because reserves of other lesser-known chemicals are also being used up. In an article called Peak Everything, Ronald Bailey writes in REASON magazine that some […] Read more
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The Launch
Reading Time: 11 minutes As your business gets worth more and more, ag companies are getting more and more sophisticated in how they’re angling for a bigger share of your wallet. Is it working? We went inside BASF’s introduction of its new kixor herbicides to find out A decade ago, launching a major new product for Canadian farmers meant […] Read more
Mark Lumley and Gabriel Carballal are blazing a new way to farm together in Uruguay. It works, because it’s good business, and it’s so very, very Canadian
Reading Time: 10 minutes With snow laying thick on the ground outside, Mark Lumley lays a palm on the globe in the corner of his no-nonsense farm office and gives the world a spin. “This is exactly how it started,” Lumley admits. “I was just so cheesed off with winter. I wanted to see the sun. I wanted to […] Read more
Will Your Next Step Be A Leap?
Reading Time: 2 minutes There s a reason why seminars about business design are dominating business conferences across North America this year and why sales are booming for books such as Roger Martin s The DESIGN OF BUSINESS: WHY DESIGN THINKING IS THE NEXT COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE. More accurately, there are two reasons. The first is less important. It s […] Read more
Real Progress Is Being Made
Reading Time: 2 minutes Our farms are challenged. The old models are falling apart. Farms aren’t just becoming larger and more specialized, they’re also becoming more diverse. Success means different things to different farmers — and to different buyers and consumers — and it’s difficult to see the path that your particular farm should take through that minefield. Our […] Read more
No Apologies
Reading Time: 2 minutes Of all the interviews I’ve done with farmers who have taken business courses or who have done detailed business planning for their farms, I’ve never run into one who has said they thought it was anything less than a very good investment. They may have wished it didn’t take as much time as it does, […] Read more
When You Can’t Be Right
Reading Time: 2 minutes The shrewdest words in this issue of Country Guide belong to Saskatchewan farmer Russ Leguee. His family, like so many farm families across this country, is wrestling with the prospect of the parents transtioning into a well-earned retirement, with the children potentially taking over. Leguee was talking about his three children and the kind of […] Read more
Market Quotes
Reading Time: 2 minutes I can’t explain exactly why it is that marketing lends itself to slogans. I don’t mean the kinds of slogans that companies use, the Just-do-it’s and the Built-Fordtough’s. I mean the jingoistic nuggets that you see on book jackets, the “sell-the-sizzle, not-the-steak” kinds of aphorisms that reap so much arrogant scorn from so-called serious disciplines, […] Read more
How Do You Measure Up?
Reading Time: 2 minutes After reaming 17 years of grain prices through his computer, and after pouring endlessly through the results, Richard Vyn knows one thing for sure. There’s no easy way to figure out exactly how good you are at marketing. Not even close. “It’s difficult,” says Vyn. “I don’t know how better to say it. It’s just […] Read more
BELIEVER
Reading Time: 5 minutes As soon as you understand that for Jim Wispinski, getting transferred out of his sales position in Edmonton and into a Toronto office in his company’s human resources department wasn’t a detour, a whole lot more about the president and CEO of DowAgroSciences Canada comes into focus. Marketing isn’t something that a company does, Wispinski […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
