For 140 years Country Guide has featured farm business insights, trends and advice.
But Country Guide — and your farm business — is about more than “just” business.
So, two years ago, Country Guide changed its tagline to “Your Farm. Your Conversation.”
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Given the hecticness of running a farm, it’s understandable if you missed this not-so-momentous change.
Why the change? Because behind every on-farm decision is a conversation — in fact, many conversations — and we want to highlight the critical topics that form the basis of the myriad business decisions you make.
Every conversation — on the farm, in the field, at the tradeshows or across the fence — has the power to drive farm families, their businesses and the industry forward.
Even conversations far from the farm, like those in Matt McIntosh’s article “Will investments in defence benefit agriculture?” World leaders’ decisions on NATO spending commitments may seem unrelated to Canadian agriculture. But defence-adjacent investments in critical national infrastructure, innovation processes and communications could benefit your farm.
On a more technical level, conversations that happen in farm peer groups have been helping farmers up their game for decades. In “Do we still need peer groups?” Helen Lammers-Helps writes about a study that showed farm businesses that have been members of management groups have an operating profit that is 43 per cent higher than their peers, a return on assets that is 2.2 per cent higher, and a higher net worth.
Even conversations in small communities can lead to meaningful change. In one rural Quebec town, conversations between multiple stakeholders led to the formation of much-needed additional health care services, as you’ll read about in “Local health care for the win.”
And sometimes conversations must be repeated if for no other reason than to affect consequential, incremental change. For example, discussions around women in leadership in the ag industry. More specifically, whether our habit of thinking of leadership ability in terms of gendered parameters is what holds women back from roles for which they are adequately suited. There are four factors that contribute to the perception that women are less effective leaders: lack of fit theory, role congruity theory, expectation states theory and the think manager-think male paradigm. You’ll learn about these in my article “What makes a leader.”
If you’re the “now gen” — the current or exiting farm owner or manager — conversations with the incoming next gen have tremendous value. Believe it or not, there’s still so much that can’t be taught through a TikTok or YouTube video. Danielle Ranger writes in “How to develop a leader’s mindset at every stage of your career” that retiring farmers’ identity and entire world will certainly change at this point of their life, “but the opportunity to be a mentor and teacher to others … just might be the most important part. Your wisdom, wealth of experience and knowledge are the farm’s greatest asset.”
Country Guide takes its role as a conversation starter seriously. We want to help you think about business in new or different ways; provide advice from top advisors to help you make critical decisions; and share stories from your peers who’ve “been there, done that” so you can learn from their adventures (or misadventures). We want to instigate and inspire. Stir up that conversational pot as it were. Give you that little kick in the pants you might need to take the next step for your farm, whatever that might look like.
What important conversations are you having on your farm? What conversation topics do you think should be covered in Country Guide? Drop me a line to let me know at [email protected].
