Reading Time: 7 minutes Jolene Brown was looking directly at the panel of three who had just lost their farming spouses. Then she asked the question. “If you had one more day, what would you say, what would you ask and, what would you do?” Brown knew it was a tough question. She’s a popular speaker, farm business adviser […] Read more
If You Died Today…
Oooh, Aaah, Ogema (Saskatchewan, That Is)
Reading Time: 6 minutes By the time you get 70 miles due south of Regina, you know what to expect. The landscape is as open in front of you as it is behind, marked only with occasional crossroads that once in a while still struggle to maintain their names and their status as villages, showing how once, a long […] Read more
The “Urban” School Of Food
Reading Time: 5 minutes Joe Nasr (left) starts out by telling me what his course is not about. “It’s not food safety,” says Nasr, instructor in food security at Ryerson University. He explains that the concept encompasses whether people have reliable access to food, whether that food is appropriate, whether it is affordable, and whether it is nutritionally balanced. […] Read more
Food For Thought In Unexpected Places
Reading Time: 2 minutes Food for Thought at U of T At the University of Toronto, I ask Prof. Harriet Friedmann — who is in the sociology and geography departments — why there is no department of food. “Food would take care of itself if farmers just grew it,” she quips, talking about post-war views of food that played […] Read more
Organic Divide
Reading Time: 13 minutes Three years ago, organic grain farmers could have been forgiven for thinking they’d found nirvana. They were the darlings of an ever-growing environmental movement. They were swooned over by consumers eager for safe and healthy food. And they were getting paid up to three times more than conventional. With wheat at $25 and $30 per […] Read more
Lease Longer, Lease Stronger
Reading Time: 8 minutes Canadian farmers know how to rent land. In fact, in 2006, they rented close to 65 million acres, and paid an estimated $2.6 billion for the privilege. Now, however, the buzz is all about long-term leases — which can make the standard one-year rental agreement look like child’s play. Long-term leases can have lots of […] Read more
Five Paths To A Fair Rent
Reading Time: 5 minutes Recent tax interpretations have reaffirmed that most retired farmers can cash rent without jeopardizing their estate and succession plans. That’s taken the wind out of crop-share agreements, but it has also created an opportunity for farmers and landlords to look at newer and better ways to establish fair rental rates. A generation ago, crop-share agreements […] Read more
Up, Up And Up!
Reading Time: 5 minutes Remember 2008? Farm commodity prices skyrocketed, and right on cue, machinery sales jumped too. The 2008 bump was so big, farmers bought equipment even faster than manufacturers could build it. It was proof that commodity prices are all it takes to drive machinery sales. Or so it seemed. Optimism was everywhere that year. All the […] Read more
All Over The Map
Reading Time: 6 minutes The odd thing is that machinery costs are very similar for farms across Canada, averaging 14 to 15 per cent of crop revenue. But if you pick any one locality — including yours — the costs of owning and operating farm equipment are all over the proverbial map. Machinery costs vary much more from farm […] Read more
What’s Your Strategy?
Reading Time: 3 minutes The advice sounds like bizspeak. I’m being told that if you want to make high-quality decisions about your machinery inventory, you need to think “strategically.” As if you wouldn’t ordinarily think about the health of your farm when making such big decisions. But Dale Kaliel means something more. Kaliel is senior production economist with Alberta […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
