Reading Time: 3 minutes As we roll into 2025, I’m very pleased to be working with the rest of the Country Guide team. Years ago, as a field editor, I split my time writing for Guide and Grainews and learned much more from Tom Button than I can summarize in one column. He wanted to produce a magazine with […] Read more
Editor’s Note: Making it happen
Editor’s Note: See you at the airport
Reading Time: 2 minutes This is my last issue at Country Guide. Retirement starts today. It begins practically the moment I hit “Send” on this column. No one could work at this job without a sense of the magazine’s history and its deep connections to Canadian farm families over the past century. I routinely get calls saying, “I’m cleaning […] Read more
Editor’s Note: Time for your vote
Reading Time: 2 minutes Canada’s mainline farm organizations are struggling for your support. They deserve another shot. That’s not based on past performance. We all have questions about one policy or another or about one political connection or another. Instead, it’s because of the scale of the challenges ahead, and because the past decade has done so much to […] Read more
Editor’s Note: Yes, it’s time to get out of the way
Reading Time: 2 minutes We still read about baby boomers, naturally. And of course there are generations X, Y and Z. Now, too, there’s Alpha, and we’re even told the first baby born this coming New Year’s Day will usher in a new group that, whatever their feelings about the matter, will have to wear the label “Generation Beta” […] Read more
Editor’s Note: A summer for decision-making
Reading Time: 2 minutes I admit I can hardly believe it. When I first signed on with Country Guide more than a decade ago, I used this space to ask a question that I honestly wondered about. The question? Can farmers grow their business productivity as fast as their crop yields? In fact, farmers have grown their professionalism at […] Read more
Editor’s Note: The character of change in agriculture
Reading Time: 2 minutes We like to draw straight lines. It’s nothing to apologize about. We all like to look around us at how things stand, then we latch onto what we see as the big trend lines and draw them out into the future, thinking that’s how to predict the world of 2030 or even 2050. It’s nothing […] Read more
Editor’s Note: meet the new renters
Reading Time: 2 minutes By and large, Canada’s farmers have adapted to all the changes in farmland renting over the past several decades. This is very good news because a lot more change is coming. Not everything is perfect in today’s rental markets. There is never enough land, for one thing. And there’s never a perfect way — or, […] Read more
Editor’s Note: Leadership – yes, it is a science
Reading Time: 2 minutes So often when we’re putting the finishing touches on your next Country Guide, I find myself pausing and thinking, “If only we could get this issue into the hands of every Canadian… Imagine the impact if they leafed through even just this one issue and saw farmers as we see them all the time.” In […] Read more
Editor’s Note: The sweet spot
Reading Time: 2 minutes We know that our January 2, 2024 issue of Country Guide only begins to explore the “sweet spot” questions that you ask yourself every day. This was inevitable, we all know, because questions about right-sizing have moved to the forefront for today’s farm management… right-sizing the farm, right-sizing the equipment inventory, right-sizing the amount of […] Read more
Editor’s Note: A journey for us all
Reading Time: 2 minutes As you visit the new Country Guide homepage, we hope you’ll get a taste of the changes we will be bringing to Canada’s national farm management magazine in coming months. These will be our most significant changes in 15 years, the year we adopted “Strategic. Business. Thinking.” as our tagline. We now think of that […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
