Reading Time: 2 minutes I’ve said it before, but it remains true. The big thing non-farmers don’t understand about farming is that so much of it hinges on decision-making. It’s one of the constants in agriculture.Farmers wrestle with more tough decisions in a year than many of their city cousins face in their entire careers, and not just because […] Read more
Looking for what doesn’t change
Future farming
If you’re in the agriculture industry the prevailing wisdom is clear. Global agriculture has an enormous — maybe insurmountable — challenge ahead of it. By 2050, our global population will reach nine billion.
Reading Time: 5 minutes Big Idea Christophe Pelletier: The key challenge is going to be feeding the animals, not the people. Everything is so much more global and interconnected that there really is no such thing as a local solution to these issues — and that has implications all over the place. For example let’s look at the implications […] Read moreHow low must we bend?
Reading Time: 2 minutes Most of us barely know what our forelock is, let alone how to tug it when we bow to the lord and lady of the manor. Nor do we know how incredibly close we came to having a landed aristocracy in Canada. All of us do sometimes wonder, however, if we could be evolving back […] Read more
An impossible dream
There’s an air of confidence down on the farm. Grain prices are historically high and returns across the livestock sector have been catching up. Not only that, but the good times seem basically guaranteed for years to come. Grain producers believe that rising global populations combined with soaring biofuel demand will mean that markets will be demand-led as far out as we can see. Livestock producers meanwhile see huge increases in demand for their own products now that higher incomes in China, India and the rest of the developing world are enabling consumers there to add more meat to their diets.
Reading Time: 4 minutes There really can be no question about it. The main driver of high grain prices over the past few years has been utilization of food crops for biofuels. Now, biofuel byproducts are also gaining acceptance in the livestock sector as a lower cost feed stuff in ration formulation. The upshot is, every farm has benefited […] Read moreDebt load
When times are good, should you pay off debt? Or should you take on more debt to add productive assets, parlaying the strength of today’s commodity prices into growth?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Rémi Lemoine: I think one of the most important things it tells us is that the issue of farm debt is very complex and can’t be boiled down to simple, almost philosophical, statements like “Pay off debt during good times.” You also can’t read too much into numbers that cover the entire industry or entire […] Read moreThe better leader
What traits set great farm business managers apart from the crowd? We asked leading farm advisers.
Reading Time: 5 minutes Brent Bender Regina district director Farm Credit Canada Great farm business managers surround themselves with an exceptional group of people, all of whom are committed to the success of the operation. These experts — the accountants, lenders, agronomists, lawyers, and involved family members — confirm whether the decisions the manager is considering making are the […] Read moreWe all make mistakes
Reading Time: 2 minutes For this issue, contributing editor Anne Lazurko interviewed McGill’s Henry Mintzberg — arguably Canada’s foremost business prof — in search of insights for managing a farm, which Mintzberg does have. But instead of telling us how farmers should copy all the good things that his corporate clients are doing, Mintzberg had a different message. Don’t […] Read more
Big Idea: Ag and the rest
If you just looked at the raw numbers, you’d think that agriculture is waning in importance in Canada. You might even think it’s an industry in decline.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Country Guide: Should we be concerned that agriculture seems to be slipping in its importance to the Canadian economy? At eight per cent of GDP, it’s not insignificant, but there are other countries out there — say Brazil for example — where agriculture retains a far-higher proportion. Al Mussell: As much as we all have […] Read moreThe end of summer
Reading Time: 2 minutes There won’t be any more recessions. I remember being told this by a good friend who has done all sorts of impressive things with Deloitte and who has all sorts of letters after his name. It was around the turn of the millennium, and his point was that economists had finally learned enough about the […] Read more
Reflections, April 2012
Reading Time: 2 minutes The Commissionaire on duty at Depot, the RCMP training academy in Regina, hands me my room keys. “Breakfast is at 6:45 a.m. and your course begins at 8 a.m.” My room, usually occupied by police cadets, is basic but comfortable. I don’t need the lock box for a firearm so I lock up my truck […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
