Reading Time: 9 minutes When Gwen Paddock began her finance career some three decades ago, farmers were looking for a chequing account, an operating loan and maybe some short-term financing for equipment and land. Not so today. “Farms are getting bigger with more moving parts,” says RBC’s national director of agriculture. “Now, farmers and farm operators are looking for […] Read more
Farm debt in perspective
Yes, $90 billion in farm debt is a lot, but most farmers should be able to weather most storms if they up their focus on their risk exposure
Which joint venture will work for you?
AME Management: Building a business structure that works for your farm
Reading Time: 6 minutes The whole world acknowledges the brilliance of Albert Einstein. He is famous for his discoveries about relativity and the pull of gravity, and for his equation E=mc2, which says that the increased relativistic mass (m) of a body times the speed of light squared (c 2) is equal to the kinetic energy (E) of that […] Read more
New at the top
Here’s how Seed Hawk’s new Swedish CEO, Birgitta Ewerlöf, aims to capture corporate synergies and expand market share
Reading Time: 4 minutes [UPDATE: Nov. 29, 2017] Birgitta Ewerlöf was replaced as CEO of Seed Hawk by Nigel Jones as reported on Oct. 31, 2017. Farmers expected the change in paint colour, since the machines built under the Seed Hawk brand are being changed to match those marketed under parent company Väderstad’s brand. But we weren’t quite so […] Read more
Going big
FarmLead takes aim at the U.S., with leaders who learned their lessons on the farm
Reading Time: 7 minutes Five years ago Brennan Turner and Alain Goubau were slogging it out alone. They were ahead of the curve, trying to sell western Canadian farmers on their vision of an online grain marketplace to connect grain producers and buyers, giving them the power to list, negotiate and finalize grain deals with no upfront cost. Today, […] Read more
In the deep end
Sarah Jackson had been planning for her farming future since she was 17 years old, knowing her father Tom would be working right alongside her. So when he died suddenly eight months ago, she was thrown into a maelstrom. It’s an old story in agriculture, but because of new attitudes and modern connections, it ends with some surprising twists
Reading Time: 10 minutes “We left the hospital, and went to tell my grandmother he had died, then I came home and loaded trucks at two in the morning,” says Jackson. Neighbours rushed to help, but “Dad hadn’t even been dead for four hours and I had no choice but to keep farming.” Hard as it was at the […] Read more
Numbers drive dynamic decision-making
Jeannette Mongeon and Michel Dignard use spreadsheets to guide everyday decisions and to analyze and embrace change. It’s good for the farm, and it also keeps peace in the family
Reading Time: 6 minutes This past spring, Michel Dignard carefully walked his saturated soybean fields, counting the thin, yellowing plants while some were still fully submerged in water. It was emotionally exhausting work, but at least Dignard and his wife Jeannette Mongeon knew what they would do next. They crunched the numbers. They added up the costs and yield […] Read more
Their joint venture
The way Doyle Wiebe and Mark Thompson work together is beginning to look like the future for a big chunk of Canada’s farms, especially in succession
Reading Time: 10 minutes Canada’s farmers are designing ever more creative business arrangements to deal with the scarcity of available land and with the capital requirements for farm expansion, diversification and succession. Now Saskatchewan producer Doyle Wiebe has developed and implemented a joint venture agreement on his farm near Langham, Sask., that may prove one of the most unique […] Read more
Seeing eye to eye
Part one in a five-part series on successful farm leadership
Reading Time: 3 minutes There are shelves full of books and articles on leadership, yet it can still be a struggle to apply their principles on our farms and to decide who leads and how. Even so, today’s farmers must recognize that fewer than one third of family-owned businesses succeed to the next generation, and we must learn to […] Read more
How big is your market?
We must get better at understanding that the world’s commodity buyers have a growing range of options
Reading Time: 6 minutes How big is your world? Geographically, this is an easy question to answer with great precision. The diameter of the Earth at the equator is 12,756 km. Its circumference is 40,030 km along the equator, and 40,008 km through the poles. Thus the surface area of our planet is roughly 510 million sq. km. It’s […] Read more
‘Do no harm’
Canada’s supply-management farmers have three blunt words of advice for our NAFTA negotiating team
Reading Time: 3 minutes Canada’s supply management sector is experiencing its usual trade-talk trepidation as the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement gets started. Even so, dairy and poultry farmers are relying on Ottawa’s assurances at meetings through the summer that the system of domestic price setting, and the high border tariffs that support it, will not […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
