Reading Time: 5 minutes Owning farmland is no longer a passion restricted to farmers. Today it is just as likely that farmland offered for sale will be bought by an individual investor, a developer, an investment fund, or even a sovereign wealth fund. While this demand is a boon to land values and those farmers seeking to sell land, […] Read more
Selling out farming
Here’s a crowdsourcing website to get all of us fighting to keep farmland ownership in the hands of farmers
Wrong choice
As farming gets more complex, what if you fear your son or daughter isn’t up to the job?
Reading Time: 6 minutes One of the hardest truths about farming, like most professions, is that some people just aren’t cut out for the work. Worse, it isn’t always clear from an early age who has the makings of a good farmer and who hasn’t, which puts some farm parents in the awkward position of having built up the […] Read more
Chain reactions
Reading Time: 5 minutes Losing a dealership chain creates distance between manufacturer and customer. As farmers get more sophisticated, the companies are exploring new strategies to bridge that divide “Claas to open corporate dealership chain,” the headline above the brief news item said in a European farm magazine this spring. But beneath that simple announcement lay a difficult marketing […] Read more
Figuring out AgriStability
Reading Time: 4 minutes This important federal program remains poorly understood on too many farms — perhaps on your farm too. Here’s why it may prove so relevant Across Canada, farmers are wondering if AgriStability still has a fit on their farms. As I wrote in the last issue of Country Guide, government funding of AgriStability has been significantly […] Read more
Making a comeback
New Holland’s restructured management team has launched an aggressive plan to push the company back into the spotlight
Reading Time: 4 minutes New Holland is back,” Abe Hughes II, the company’s vice-president of sales and marketing for North America declared to a group of farm writers in late April at the company’s North American headquarters in Pennsylvania. It was just one sentence, but it is worth coming over 1,500 miles to hear. In a very real sense, […] Read moreRight facts, wrong results
A whimsical Manitoba study shows how research can be manipulated to show agronomic benefits where none exist. Can you spot the fallacy?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Obviously, it’s silly. Or is it? John Heard, for one, thinks all of us can be lured into believing the research that we want to believe, whether it’s true or not. To put that idea to the test, Heard sprayed diluted maple syrup on a block of canola at the University of Manitoba’s Carman research […] Read moreNitrogen without Agrium
Reading Time: 6 minutes Farmers across Canada and the Midwest Grain Belt of the U.S. are angry and frustrated over the price they had to pay for nitrogen fertilizer this past spring. They want to know why the price of nitrogen fertilizer was nearly as high as it has ever been even though natural gas is near record lows. […] Read more
Management
Reading Time: 4 minutes Henry Mintzberg may be Canada’s most famous business thinker, but his thinking about farming sounds at first very unbusiness-like. Farmers, he believes, will do a better job of managing if they not only see their farm as a business but also embrace the lifestyle that comes with it. In fact, much of what Mintzberg preaches […] Read more
What Cargill says
More eyes are on Cargill with the looming end of the CWB’s single desk. In this exclusive, Cargill national grain marketing manager Tyler Russell shares the company’s hopes, and its advice for growers
Reading Time: 6 minutes While some farmers are heralding the end of the CWB single desk, others are now dreading selling wheat and barley into an open market. But what all farmers need to realize is that the fundamentals of wheat and barley marketing have not changed. End-user demand for wheat and barley in the world has neither gone […] Read moreA long way to go
Mobile technology is paying big time for Gary Sanocki. The challenge is, he wants it to pay even more
Reading Time: 8 minutes Here’s a question that your iPhone can’t answer. With all the phones and tablets out there, how much value can you expect mobile technology to add to your farm, and how much cost can you expect the learning curve, the program limitations, and the lack of connectivity to your PC to add to your farm? […] Read moreA message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
