Reading Time: 8 minutes Advocacy to Amanda Brodhagen means taking action. It’s not just about sharing her farm experiences on social media — although she does plenty of that — it’s about taking time to volunteer at the Beef Farmers of Ontario booth at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair each year as well as serving on the executive of […] Read more
A FLARE for agriculture
For FLARE magazine, it was an idea to attract readers. For Amanda Brodhagen, it was a chance to shatter so many farm stereotypes
Two minds
More couples like the De Groots are taking advanced farm business training together, and report that it’s good both for the farm and for their marriage
Reading Time: 6 minutes To say that Marty and Krista De Groot have their hands full is an understatement. The young couple are in the midst of taking over the third-generation family farm from Marty’s parents. Although his dad, Jack, still helps out, Marty does the bulk of the daily work, taking care of the 40,000 broiler chickens, 2,500 […] Read more
Success story
A new survey shows our farmers actually are finding ways to transition their farms to the next generation
Reading Time: 6 minutes There’s encouraging news from a fresh survey of multi-generational farms in Canada and the U.S. Amid all the debate that the 2016 ag census has generated about whether farmers are actually getting serious about Canada’s huge farm succession challenge, this survey shows that many farms are getting on with the job just fine, thanks. No […] Read more
Short-liners get aggressive
We sit down with Leah Olson, president of Agricultural Manufacturers of Canada, to take the pulse of today’s Canadian short-line equipment manufacturers
Reading Time: 5 minutes In past years, as the calendar began leading up to summer, my email inbox would fill with press releases from short-line ag equipment manufacturers hungry to show off their their new models and boost sales. This year, however, was quiet. There just weren’t as many announcements as I’d come to expect. Yes, there have been […] Read more
Europe’s biggest farm
On an island in the Danube, the Agricost farm is 145,000 acres, which its owners say makes it truly sustainable
Reading Time: 9 minutes Here on the Great Island of Braila in the middle of the Danube River in Romania, the summer day is hot and dry, perfect for the beginning of the barley harvest. On the Agricost farm, 20,000 acres of barley wait for the combine. The crop looks good; conditions have been ideal. Agricost farms 145,000 of […] Read more
Who’s too old?
Farm families know that age diversity makes them stronger. But did you know that a spread of ages in your employees adds strength too?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Diversity in the workforce is a good thing, but diversity doesn’t mean just diversity of gender or ethnicity. It also means age diversity. Increasingly, older workers aren’t retiring gracefully to play golf and potter in the garden. Instead, they are making a conscious decision to change careers later in life, when the experience and skills […] Read more
Is agriculture ageist?
We tend to respect our elders more in agriculture,” says Tracy Biernacki-Dusza. Even so, ageism is one of the last and most common areas of bias
Reading Time: 3 minutes More than four in 10 Canadians feel that ageism is the most tolerated form of social prejudice, according to the Revera Report on Ageism: Independence and Choice as We Age, released in May 2016 by Revera Inc. and the Sheridan Centre for Elder Research. This is more than double the number who rated racism or […] Read more
Open market, but not-so-open information
Five years post-CWB, farmers are still waiting for information that puts them on a more even position with the companies buying their grain
Reading Time: 5 minutes The characters in the play “Waiting for Godot” and Prairie grain market transparency apparently have something in common — waiting for something that never arrives. It’s been five years since the end of the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly, when one of the goals was to expose Prairie wheat and barley growers to the mechanisms of […] Read more
Leadership on the farm — empowerment
Part two in a five-part series on successful farm leadership
Reading Time: 4 minutes Leadership surrounds me in my daily work with farm families across Ontario. One thing our succession conversations always circle back to is leadership, both in theory and in practice (and as we all know, the practice part is the difficult part.) We are still learning to wrap our heads around what collaborative leadership looks like […] Read more
U.S. women own it
When we think ‘farmer,’ we often also think ‘male.’ Because it’s men who own the farmland, right?
Reading Time: 5 minutes The truth of farmland ownership is changing, especially the picture of who owns farmland in the United States, where the numbers are a bit clearer than here in Canada, and where the shift has been underway for decades. The questions are simple enough: How many women own farmland in the U.S.? What are the parameters […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
