Reading Time: 3 minutes Gilbert Ferré grows 2,500 acres of wheat, barley, oats, canola and peas in the Zenon Park area of northeastern Saskatchewan. His son Nicolas farms with him, much as Gilbert farmed with his own father when he started out in 1974. Now, with years of experience behind him, Ferré doesn’t hesitate when asked what marketing advice […] Read more
Talk It Up
Trading Places
Reading Time: 7 minutes A handful of companies still dominate the global grain trade. Chances are, you’re still selling to them too, either directly through a local elevator they own, or indirectly through the maze of marketing agreements that local buyers negotiate with them. But scratch that surface and you’ll find a sector that’s undergoing an enormous transformation — […] Read more
Crop Adviser’s Solution – for Oct. 11, 2010
Reading Time: 2 minutes One hard-working producer called me last June about his field of canola. His outside round looked great — a thick stand of healthy plants at the three to four leaf stage. The inside of his field was another story. It was sparsely populated with sickly, yellow, mottled, dying plants. Up close, a sharp and clearly […] Read more
The Marketing Puzzle – for Oct. 11, 2010
Reading Time: 13 minutes A call, a put, a naked writer. At-the-money, in-the-money, out-of-the-money. It s enough to make you think you re locked inside a jigsaw puzzle where none of the pieces fit. In fact, though, if you go to some online dictionaries of grain marketing terms, you ll find these are a mere handful of the sub-categories […] Read more
Trading Places – for Oct. 11, 2010
Reading Time: 7 minutes Ahandful of companies still dominate the global grain trade. Chances are, you re still selling to them too, either directly through a local elevator they own, or indirectly through the maze of marketing agreements that local buyers negotiate with them. But scratch that surface and you ll find a sector that s undergoing an enormous […] Read more
Talk To Me – for Oct. 11, 2010
Reading Time: 7 minutes Big tractors, big combines, big bins. Everything we thought was progressive about agriculture was always big. So, if few of us expected that one or our most important technological advances would come from turning our clunky rotary-dial telephones into palm-sized communication devices that have many, many times the computing power necessary to land men on […] Read more
Buy A Better Smartphone – for Oct. 11, 2010
Reading Time: 3 minutes Strut, turn, hold that pose. Whew, don t you look good with that smartphone. Choices are made less about feature sets and more about what seems to be the hot phone to have, University of Toronto computer science professor Eugene Fiume says of the urban market. But that changes when you leave It s also […] Read more
R.O.A. – for Aug. 30, 2010
Reading Time: 3 minutes Farmers live poor and die rich. That’s what the old adage says, and as the average age of Canadian farmers continues to creep up, it certainly seems true. According to Statistics Canada, the average Canadian farm in 2008 had assets valued at about $1.5 million and a net worth of $1.28 million. More important, though, […] Read more
Grain And Oilseed Farms – for Aug. 30, 2010
Reading Time: 4 minutes On Feb. 25, 2008, Hard Red Spring wheat peaked at an incredible $24 a bushel on the Minneapolis exchange. “That affected the psyche of the entire grain market,” says Derek Brewin, professor at the University of Manitoba’s department of agribusiness and agricultural economics. The 2007 to 2008 price rallies set off a wave of farm […] Read more
PIGS – for Aug. 30, 2010
Reading Time: 3 minutes Nowhere is it more true than in the hog sector. Abnormal is the new normal in Canadian agriculture overall, but the swine industry in particular experienced repeated, devastating blows during the five-year sample period. It used to be that revenue per pig produced was cyclical. Typically the price cycle was two years up, two down. […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
