Reading Time: 7 minutes Today, you feel it’s a board that you could maybe help. Admittedly, that wasn’t quite the way you felt after you first showed up at one of its meetings, returning to the farm totally frustrated. All the directors seemed to have been there forever. They struck you as stale and apathetic, just going through the […] Read more
Board business
A board wants you to sign on as a director, but is it the right board for you? Watch for these signals
Compete and win
Your machinery strategy may be nothing less than the factor deciding how long you’ll be in the world of agricuture
Reading Time: 6 minutes It’s an impressive resumé, showing how Joerg Zimmermann’s work and his research, plus his strong entrepreneur/farmer streak, have taken him to most of the main grain-growing regions of the world, including in Canada. It’s a series of experiences that have given Zimmermann a unique perspective about what farming looks like in the world’s breadbaskets. And […] Read more
Putting down roots in Canadian soil
With farmers like Peter Nikkel helping Raymond Ngarboui, refugees from the world’s trouble spots are getting a new chance
Reading Time: 13 minutes Before we even exchange our first word, I get a sense of Raymond Ngarboui. When we meet, he’s on the phone with a refugee settlement counsellor who asks if he might have garden plots available for two families from Burundi, recently arrived in Winnipeg and feeling stressed and isolated. This is 43-year-old Ngarboui’s side-project but […] Read more
Top HR issues for farmers
Concerns about employment standards and employee performance are driving more farmers into HR training
Reading Time: 6 minutes When human resources consultant Janice Goldsborough first gets a telephone call from a farmer, it’s usually with questions related to employment standards. “They might be asking about whether they have to pay overtime, the rules around statutory holidays, or is their farm even covered under employment standards; those are typically the kind of questions that […] Read more
Hip, Hip, Hip Hooray for me!
Celebrating success when you’re a go-it-alone farmer
Reading Time: 6 minutes Front and centre in almost every “how to succeed in business” book is the recommendation to take time to celebrate success. As the authors point out, celebrating is a great way to mark progress, foster team spirit, build staff loyalty, push a business to greater heights — and ultimately trigger more success. But does that […] Read more
Farm equipment sales evolve for 2018
Rocky Mountain Equipment exec Jim Wood talks about Canadian ag machinery sales trends
Reading Time: 4 minutes As U.S. and Canadian farm equipment dealerships wrestled with their hangover from the half-decade of hyper sales activity that ended a couple of years ago, the job of finding new homes for a large number of used machines may have been their biggest problem. For the most part, that trouble has now faded from view, […] Read more
‘Fake News’ and the farm
Politicians may have just caught on about ‘fake news,’ but farmers have known for years what it’s like to live in a world where anything can and does get said and believed. Now, there is a way to counter the din of anti-activists, the food conspiracy theorists, and the faddists. And it may just start with you.
Reading Time: 7 minutes Just 18 short months ago, almost no one — not politicians, not reporters, not lay people — used the term ‘fake news.’ Sure, bias and dishonesty have existed in politics, in sales, in industry and in media forever. What’s new since the viral spread of the ‘fake news’ concept, though, is our almost universal belief […] Read more
Farm travel
It’s a world full of farms, and more and more Canadian farmers are signing up for travel opportunities to experience them
Reading Time: 8 minutes Words like “holiday” and “vacation” just weren’t in her parents’ vocabulary when Lu Inkster grew up on her family’s Ontario cattle farm in the 1950s. Her parents had immigrated to Canada from Belgium after the Second World War, and to them the concept of taking time off was both foreign and unattainable. “People like my […] Read more
NAFTA indecision
Washington may be divided on NAFTA, but machinery manufacturers certainly know where they stand
Reading Time: 5 minutes Through mid-winter, the push from machinery executives for the U.S. government to reach a deal on NAFTA seemed to be gearing up. AEM (the Association of Equipment Manufacturers) was sending out that message even louder and clearer than it had been on behalf of its member companies in the ag and construction machinery sector. An […] Read more
The heart of the deal
How significant is the local dealer in determining what you buy?
Reading Time: 5 minutes One evening a year or so ago I sat in a hotel lounge in rural England with a couple of other ag machinery writers. We were gathered there for a machinery event and were all staying in the same hotel. We spent part of that evening discussing the differences between farmer perceptions of machinery in […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
