Reading Time: 5 minutes Farmers who can identify new business opportunities have a valuable leg up in this competitive and rapidly changing world, so Country Guide reached out to innovative farmers and to innovation experts for their insights into finding that next winning idea. 1. Be Tenacious What does it take? For one, it takes attitude. Over and over […] Read more
Summer Series: Your next great business idea
[Make It Count] These five tips promise to make you even better at spotting great business ideas for your farm
Summer Series: The family landscape
[Land] The Impact: Rising farmland values mean new farm opportunities, and frequent challenges for family harmony
Reading Time: 5 minutes Once considered among the most traditional, unchanging ways of life, farming today is being transformed. Farmland values are changing the nature of farming and farm business management, and introducing new opportunities and risks. Plus, they are creating challenges for farm families. Land prices are raising new questions about how to direct assets to different siblings, […] Read more
Summer Series: Getting big with small potatoes
[Change Management] Can you transition your hot new idea into a stable, growth-oriented business? The Little Potato Company’s Angela Santiago had to figure out how to do just that, and quick
Reading Time: 8 minutes At first, it seemed their real job would be to build awareness. What could have been clearer than that? After all, they had the idea already. Jacob van der Schaaf and his daughter, Angela Santiago, could see a market gap for the kind of small, flavourful potatoes that van der Schaaf had grown up with […] Read more
Summer Series: A ‘real’ solution for managing change
[Change Management] Resilient people don’t let their imaginations run away with them. They train themselves to see their problems as challenges, not worries, and they get real about fixing them
Reading Time: 5 minutes Change and challenge affect everyone differently. Even so, research by the American Psychological Association shows we can get better at handling life-changing and stressful situations over time. We can acquire coping skills, a.k.a. resilience. As farmers, we’ve experienced repeated setbacks and we’ve been able to explore our resilience boundaries over the last few years (COVID-19, […] Read more
Summer Series: Business connections
[Change Management] Planning a new venture? Keep close to other innovative and entrepreneurial minds
Reading Time: 5 minutes Of course farmers are proudly independent, and of course there are huge advantages in fixing your own problems and setting your own direction. But if diversification might be on your agenda, or if you’re dreaming of launching an innovative new business, there can be big costs too. Today, there’s even more proof that mixing with […] Read more
Summer Series: Do sweat the details
[Best Advice] Accounting advice to get more competitive
Reading Time: 5 minutes When it comes to farm accounting, it’s increasingly about the details and it’s the farmers who notice them who come out on top. Here are the top four tips to get more competitive.– April Stewart, CG Associate Editor Blair Sanderson sees it time and again. “The difference between a good producer and a great one,” […] Read more
Summer Series: How to prepare for business meetings
[Best Advice] Getting serious about family meetings is helping this farm score current and future gains
Reading Time: 6 minutes During family farm meetings it’s important for everyone to take off their family hat and address each other in a professional manner. Follow these tried-and-true tips and tricks for successful family business meetings. – April Stewart, CG Associate Editor At one of their first business meetings on their farm, Betty Green served coffee and cake […] Read more
A plan for successful farm meetings
The Spurrs are driving even more growth and efficiency by continuing the family meetings that helped them get to a transition plan
Reading Time: 9 minutes The story gets repeated time and again. A farm family invests time and money in a professional farm advisor to help them sort out a transition plan and how to implement it. Finally, almost incredibly, after a series of family meetings that started out nervous but eventually get surprisingly productive, everybody gets on board with […] Read more
Don’t hit send on that email yet!
Maybe YOU don’t need any advice on how and when to email. Probably it’s just all those other people who send their sloppy emails to you. If so, here’s what to tell them
Reading Time: 3 minutes Did you get the email? It seems we’re all guilty. We’re getting worse at email, not better. We send an email and then, when the recipient doesn’t understand what we’re saying, we blame THEM. Duh!? Or we send an email and only mean it to be a quick note but somehow it gets spun into […] Read more
Is it better to acquire a nearby farm, or merge?
Because so many farms are incorporated today, the next time you expand you may actually need to be open to a merger. But, as BDO’s Kyle Lopez tells us below, it’s likely to be a merger with a very clear, very circumscribed role
Reading Time: 6 minutes Everyone knows what “acquisition” means. A neighbour’s farm comes up for sale, you pay the price, you own it. It’s yours. But what about “mergers.” In most business sectors, the two terms — “mergers and acquisitions”— always go hand in hand. Are mergers even happening in farming? The answer from Kyle Lopez, senior BDO tax […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
