Reading Time: 5 minutes It’s a new dynamic. Today, crude oil prices and global currency trading are huge drivers across farm commodity markets, affecting prices much more than the spec funds, and often much more than simple supply and demand. Dr. Julieta Frank joined the Department of Agribusiness and Agricultural Economics at the University of Manitoba in early 2009 […] Read more
2006 The Year It All Changed
Have You Any Wool?
Reading Time: 4 minutes After decades of low wool prices, Canada’s 10,000 sheep producers are warming up to the perfect storm of high prices and low world supplies. “We expect much-improved wool prices for the upcoming year for both finer and coarse micron wools,” says Eric Bjergson, manager of the Canadian Co-operative of Wool Growers in Ottawa. For years, […] Read more
Vital Statistics
Reading Time: 9 minutes There are almost as many financial ratios as seed varieties, and choosing which are most meaningful for your farm — and most helpful for how you manage for success — can be more than difficult. It can be positively head spinning. Should you track current ratio or working capital? Is ROA a good guide, or […] Read more
Cooking Up A Profit
Reading Time: 10 minutes At some point or other, everyone who has gone to farm meetings has had the valueadded sermon preached at them. The basic speech comes with a few variations, but regardless whether it’s delivered by a slick consultant, an earnest public servant or even just a smart-aleck journalist, it always comes with the same main points. […] Read more
The Third Way
Reading Time: 7 minutes Let’s say that you are thinking about retiring but you have no family members who want to farm. If you’re like most Canadian farmers facing this prospect, you will consider just two options, either to sell the farm or to rent it out. Or let’s say you are thinking of leaving land to a family […] Read more
The Final Frontier
Reading Time: 5 minutes While Canada’s farmers rub their hands dreaming about all those potential sales of beef and pork to Asia’s booming middle class, farm equipment makers are positively drooling at the prospect of selling tractors to Chinese and Indian farmers. It turns out the economic power of many farmers in those countries is growing at least as […] Read more
Tough Call
Reading Time: 6 minutes If they think of it at all, many Canadian farmers think of custom combining as something for Americans. North of the border, the conventional wisdom is, you can’t rely on custom. Time’s too short during harvest. You need to own your own machine so you can use it whenever you need it. But there are years […] Read more
Succession: How Do We Start?
Reading Time: 6 minutes I was 22 and I had somehow scraped up enough courage to ask my parents about the possibility of succession. It’s a moment carved in my memory. There I was sitting in the kitchen of the farmhouse with my soon-to-be husband, my Dad and our provincial ag rep. The ag rep asked what we wanted […] Read more
Fair Treatment
Reading Time: 6 minutes ith land values climbing across the country, farming children can no longer expect to inherit all their parents’ farmland. Nonfarming siblings will almost certainly be in line for at least part of the farm. The dollars are just too big to give them all to only one of the children. The question is: Does that […] Read more
A Brand New Game
Reading Time: 5 minutes Back in the 1960s and ’70s, Massey Ferguson’s higher-horsepower tractor production was centred in the Detroit area. The facility there churned out a lot of machines. But then came the dark days of the late 1980s. A perfect storm of low farm commodity prices, high interest rates, declining farm machinery sales, and a variety of […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
