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“HR tends to get put on the back burner,” says Jennifer Doelman.
Guide HR

Get professional with your HR

The Doelman family is finding their HR plan is an essential pillar for their farm’s success. You may too

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With the current shortage of good labour in the ag industry, putting more effort into HR planning can help you keep your staff, thereby saving the cost and aggravation of recruiting and training new people — if you can find them. Hiring new staff is worse than dating, says Jennifer Doelman, who farms with her […] Read more
Are you willing to give up the comfortable anonymity of commodity sales? If yes, and if you do it well, the market may have room for you. But pay close attention to those costs.
Guide Business, Management

Beyond commodity agriculture: Business decisions for your farm

AME Management: Whatever approach you take, the aim should be to improve your bottom line

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When commodity prices are on their way to finding a bottom, many producers look to change their business model away from commodity crop and livestock production. While this is not a new phenomenon, it is becoming a more important strategy as the traditional commodity strategy — i.e. to increase scale — becomes harder to execute. […] Read more
Last year, Statistics Canada revealed Canadian farm debt exceeds a record $100 billion dollars.
Guide Business, Opinion

Borrowing our way to prosperity

Is it healthy for Canada’s farmers to have more debt than 130 of the world’s national governments?

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Farmers and the ag industry love to set records. They drool over variety yields, bushels per acre, acres per hour, rates of gain, and any other metric that might portray them as more productive, efficient or simply better than their competitors. Yet barely a word was mentioned last spring when Statistics Canada revealed Canadian farm […] Read more
Selling land and inventory as soon as possible is not the best financial approach when winding down a farm business.
Guide Business

When the time comes to downsize

To paraphrase Canadian country singer Corb Lund, perhaps you have decided that everything is NOT better with cows around

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Maybe it is time to consider gracefully exiting your farm business. There could be multiple reasons for the decision: just one too many tough harvests; an terrible spring for calving out cows like the one Alberta and Saskatchewan saw in 2018; children who genuinely have no desire to carry on the farm business; or perhaps, […] Read more
Lozova plans to first introduce itself to Canadian farmers with its Ducat disc harrow.
Guide Business, Machinery

Building their Canadian base

While the rest of us had our eyes turned south, Ukrainian manufacturer Losova used CUFTA to set up shop in Canada

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If we’ve heard about NAFTA and USMCA once during the past 12 months, we’ve heard about them a million times, and for good reason. As the U.S. president’s rhetoric around the renegotiations heated up, the risk to established supply chains in virtually every manufacturing sector kept business executives up at night. Now, with a new […] Read more
Guide Business

Is it time to rethink your farm debt?

Debt has soared with farm income. For most farms, that’s good. But what about yours?

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Over the past decade, the consensus among Canada’s ag economists has been clear. Yes, farmers have accumulated more debt than ever. But the debt load is manageable. There’s no looming crisis. Now, however, with the prospect of a series of modest interest rate hikes, can we still be so complacent? First, let’s look at the […] Read more
As a producer, are you getting enough feedback from the consumers of your grains? If not, you need to ask why.
Guide Business, Opinion

Time to take control

When it comes to the future of Canada’s grains sector, no one is steering the ship. We can’t let that continue

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In September, I challenged farmers to think about how Canada’s agricultural production should be branded. I questioned how consumers and foreign buyers view the commodities we produce. And most importantly, I wanted every farmer to ask themselves if production practices they use add or diminish that brand. That column upset some farmers. Readers felt my […] Read more
California-based Thor expects to begin truck production in 2019.
Equipment, Machinery

A jolt for heavy trucks

In contrast to the farm sector, electrification is making rapid gains in heavy trucks

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Over the past several years, whenever Country Guide has tracked progress toward electrification in ag equipment, we’ve seen a stop-and-go process with manufacturers showing several new concept models one year, followed by little if anything the next. The contrast with the heavy truck sector is striking. There, we’re seeing a consistent and rapid march toward […] Read more
A weak Canadian dollar is beneficial overall to Canadian farmers as they export the majority of their agricultural products.
Guide Business, News

Black swans

What will it take to knock Canada’s farmland market out of its holding pattern?

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Canadian dollar “Excluding an extraordinary shock to production or commodity prices, a significant increase in the value of the Canadian dollar would have the biggest impact on the supply of farmland available for sale,” says Saskatchewan realtor Tim Hammond. A weak Canadian dollar is beneficial overall to Canadian farmers as they export the majority of […] Read more
Rolling prairie landscape. Central Alberta, Canada.
Guide Business, News

Less of the same

Realtors report farm sales are slowing and that prices are stabilizing, which may be best for everyone

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Barring major shocks to the agriculture sector, the outlook is for continued strong farmland values and tight farmland availability in Canada for the foreseeable future. “By and large, we see a very healthy, very robust farmland market out there, and it seems to be continuing,” says Tom Eisenhauer, president and CEO of Toronto-based Bonnefield, Canada’s […] Read more

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