Jim Wickett, WCWG chair

Wheat Growers build ‘top board’ performance

It’s no accident the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association gets 
high marks for the quality of its board of farmer directors

Reading Time: 7 minutes Filling board seats is never an easy task. Your top prospects may be reluctant to offer their time, especially if both spouses are busy raising a family in addition to their farming and off-farm careers. Others are already fully committed, or even over-committed in other off-farm roles. Yet the other harsh reality is that even […] Read more

farmer in a haybarn

Are you a good leader on your farm?

Like never before, your farm needs new leadership for a new business environment. Are you getting the job done? Rate yourself on these five key leadership traits

Reading Time: 6 minutes Quick, name five strengths that farmers need in order to get their day’s work done. It’s simple, right? You need technological, financial, production, and mechanical skills, and of course, we should never forget hands-on experience. Now, just as fast, list five leadership skills that farmers need for success into the future… Not so easy, is […] Read more


James Reesor

Focus on where you can lead

At RFW Farms, the goal is to inject certainty into what can seem a very uncertain business. How they do that is a story in itself

Reading Time: 7 minutes In 1995 James Reesor and a business partner bought a 300-sow farrowing herd. Today, two decades later, RFW Farms is a 4,000-sow farrow-to-finish multi-site operation, producing about 2,000 hogs a week. By all measures, those 20 years have been challenging times in the hog business, yet this company has emerged as one of the largest […] Read more

Farmer and His Son Leaning on a Gate in a Paddock on a Farm

Talking things out is the key to a successful farm

Guide Thrive 2015: It’s simple enough to avoid discussing the big things and the little things that really matter. It’s just that most farms will never really thrive until you do

Reading Time: 8 minutes Megan McKenzie has observed elections in Congo, she has documented human rights issues in Columbia and the Middle East, she has worked at a reconciliation centre in Ireland, and along the way she has earned a doctorate in conflict resolution and international peace studies, along with mediation training. All this despite growing up on a […] Read more


Larry Martin

Strategy: The foundation of your farm

AME Management: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”

Reading Time: 3 minutes Many businesses, in farming and elsewhere, have no formal plan. Some are happy with the result, many are not. But many discover that developing a strategic plan and carefully implementing it has two effects. First is that it helps identify the desired outcome (where you’re going, your vision for the future). Second, it identifies the […] Read more

man sitting at desk

Finding the right agricultural niche

Is niche diversification really the right strategy for your farm? Your best answer may come from answering this: ‘How driven are you?’

Reading Time: 5 minutes The reasons for wanting to diversify the farming operation are almost as diverse as the opportunities themselves. On many farms, it’s because expansion is so costly at today’s land prices, so the only way to grow is to intensify. Or it may be because there are more generations needing to draw income from the operation. […] Read more


The best farm advice

The best farm advice

These five questions will help you be sure you’ve got the right business advisers for your farm

Reading Time: 8 minutes It’s not a bad thing to seek outside advice — as long as it’s good advice. No matter how smart you are, you can’t be aware of all your options and opportunities. We all need great input that we can ruminate on, evaluate and implement, and this great input must come from people we are […] Read more

farm

The challenge of diversification

The odds that your diversification plan will succeed are just one in five. But you can stack the deck

Reading Time: 6 minutes For decades, on-farm diversification has been talked about, ruminated on, spit at and swallowed whole. We’ve seen underdogs become successes, and we’ve also seen outrageous failures, even when they had big government backing. At the same time, economies of scale have propelled non-diversified farms to unbelievable sizes, backed by the five-year bull market in grains. […] Read more


Aerial of agricultural land

Sharpen your pencils

It’s time for a hard look at your rental land. How much does it make sense to pay?

Reading Time: 5 minutes I know I’m not alone. the squeeze is on all across Canada, and everyone can point to sets of numbers like the ones I’m looking at in Ontario, with a short 2014 growing season and with off-the-combine corn well below $4 per bushel. So Country Guide asked the Ontario ag ministry’s farm business analyst John […] Read more

aerial view of corn field

Farm debt ratio in Canada could create an agricultural ‘bust’

Will history repeat itself, with a sell-off fuelled by farm debt?

Reading Time: 5 minutes Are we heading into another bust in agriculture, as happened in the late 1920s and in the 1980s? This is the fear of some farmers, and of some agricultural economists too. George Brinkman, professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, believes Canadian farmers are seriously over-leveraged and that there simply is not enough farm income […] Read more