Reading Time: 3 minutes This past fall the federal government introduced the Accelerated Investment Incentive, giving Canadian businesses the ability to write off capital expenditures faster. Encased in its 2018 Fall Economic Statement, this incentive allows farmers and other businesses more depreciation in the year an asset is purchased … a lot more. The idea is to spur business […] Read more
Tax change: Depreciable purchases written-off faster
For farmers and agribusinesses the new measures will provide a larger tax write-off sooner
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
Reading Time: 5 minutes 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
Beyond commodity agriculture: Business decisions for your farm
AME Management: Whatever approach you take, the aim should be to improve your bottom line
Reading Time: 4 minutes 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
Borrowing our way to prosperity
Is it healthy for Canada’s farmers to have more debt than 130 of the world’s national governments?
Reading Time: 5 minutes 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
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
Reading Time: 4 minutes 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
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
Reading Time: 5 minutes 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
Is it time to rethink your farm debt?
Debt has soared with farm income. For most farms, that’s good. But what about yours?
Reading Time: 5 minutes 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
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
Reading Time: 6 minutes 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
A jolt for heavy trucks
In contrast to the farm sector, electrification is making rapid gains in heavy trucks
Reading Time: 6 minutes 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
Black swans
What will it take to knock Canada’s farmland market out of its holding pattern?
Reading Time: 4 minutes 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
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
