Tom Button

Editor’s Note: It’s time to ask the question

Reading Time: 2 minutes Family businesses are different. A non-family business’s goal is to make money. A family business’s goal is both to build legacy and create opportunity. And it’s more than that too  Most likely, we’ve all heard it. Almost as many of us have said it, and at least as many actually do believe it.  It can […] Read more

Tom Button

Editor’s Note: Competent, not boastful

Reading Time: 2 minutes Like every other issue of Country Guide, our pages show Canada’s farms are getting more and more individualistic. That’s a good thing. It’s a professional thing. And it won’t stop If you’re having a bad day, you’ll find our January 2023 issue of Country Guide a pretty easy target.  That’s okay.  For example, Richard Kamchen […] Read more


Tom Button

Editor’s Note: That thing about young farmers

Reading Time: 2 minutes Today’s mid-career farmers have got things figured out. They know they’re different. They’re more professional, they’re more management oriented, they’re more strategic, but …  But, as a group, they’re at risk of getting outshone by the young farmers in the next generation that are starting to show what they can do.  You’ll see it in […] Read more

Tom Button

Editor’s Note: Who’s that driving down the lane?

Reading Time: 2 minutes Compare the yard and buildings outside your back door with that tired old stretch of Main Street in your nearby town. It’s obvious where you’d rather do business. Or is it?  It’s rarely wise to generalize in agriculture, so let me put this generalization down in print right away and we can move past it.  […] Read more


Tom Button

Editor’s Note: The real thought leaders in agriculture

Reading Time: 2 minutes Once again, the big revolutions in agriculture are taking us in directions that no one really expected, led by people that so many said would never be leaders — our farmers Our days here at Country Guide are spent trying to keep pace with Canada’s farmers.  It’s a bigger challenge — and a more relevant […] Read more

Tom Button

Editor’s Note: A test to restore faith in the farm

Reading Time: 2 minutes Two questions keep many farm families awake at night. Can your next generation be reasonably expected to preserve and grow the farm’s net value? Could you do it, facing what they face? As I wrote some four years ago in this space, “Fortunately, science can help.” Every issue of Country Guide deals with this issue. […] Read more


Tom Button

Editor’s Note: A valuable change in our thinking

Reading Time: 2 minutes Reinventing the farm can feel like a concept that’s being pushed down the throat of today’s agriculture. Instead let’s call it what it really is: “reinventing the farmer.”  Change is never simple on the farm. It’s so much easier to keep doing things the way you’ve always done them than adopt something new.  “Easier, and […] Read more

Tom Button

Editor’s Note: Making up your mind in 2022

It’s what people who aren’t business leaders rarely understand. Leadership means knowing how to make big decisions when you don’t have full information, like this year

Reading Time: 2 minutes I have been asking myself this question all spring. I’m sure you have been too. Five years from now, when we look back at 2022, who are we going to say made the best decisions? Who pulled the right levers? What choices turned out to be the right decisions? Which turned out to be not […] Read more


Tom Button

Editor’s Note: Who can say you don’t deserve it?

Reading Time: 2 minutes The black swans of 2022 have helped reveal the true value of our farms and of the products they produce. The questions that this raises have an easy answer Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about agriculture is how rarely we stand back in awe of it. For instance, in the paragraph on top, I shouldn’t […] Read more

Tom Button

Editor’s Note: What will you read tomorrow?

Reading Time: 2 minutes It rarely gets said in print but it’s true. One of the things Canada gets right about its agriculture is its farm media. We did it well 100 years ago. I’m convinced we still do. Now we’re asking, where do we go from here?  I’m not talking only, or even mainly, about Country Guide when […] Read more