Reading Time: 2 minutes I’m an optimist. Are you? Let’s find out. Overall, our farm sector is healthier than it has been at any time in my memory. Nor do I see any precipices in our immediate future. There can always be bad news. But really, who actually thinks that interest rates are going to jump into double digits […] Read more
Editor’s Note: 2018 – Is this the ‘year of destiny?’
As we head toward spring, there’s a growing ambitiousness among many Canadian farmers, and an edge to their certainty that it is crucial to make progress before the year is out
Editor’s Note: The next step on this road
“Team” is a word we rarely print in Country Guide, but that’s about to change. The reason is simple. Teamwork is becoming so central in farming, it’s worth getting past our hesitations
Reading Time: 2 minutes I’ve been thinking a lot about teams lately. Not sports teams, but the kind of teams we use to keep Country Guide in the black, and the teams you’re using more often in farming, whether you call them that or not. I increasingly think there’s no greater proof of how rapidly the Canadian farm is […] Read more
Editor’s Note: ‘Skills revolution’ picks up pace
More than ever, the core asset on any farm is the decision maker in the middle, and how they harness the incredible array of technologies and talents around them into a cohesive whole
Reading Time: 2 minutes We’ve all grown up with the idea that agriculture progresses by step changes, and that these step changes are identified by the technologies that have driven them. Think of the breakthroughs in farm machinery and how they have made it possible to harvest more acres of higher-quality crops per person than could ever have been […] Read more
Editor’s Note: They’re wrong about our farmers
Today’s agriculture is proof that farmers are a resource you can grow a country on. So why would you want to stymie them?
Reading Time: 2 minutes I rarely talk politics in this space, and I like it that way. But as we put this issue together, I find I’m trying read the facial gestures of federal cabinet ministers, I’m scrutinizing their word choices, and I’m asking everyone I know what they’re hearing in the back corridors. It isn’t exactly how you’d […] Read more
Editor’s Note: Get in with the right questions
If you want to know who is going to be farming five years from now, then taking a look at who is in the aisles at Ag in Motion and at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show is a good place to start
Reading Time: 2 minutes Business schools teach a useful rule. Whether you’re CEO of Ford or if you run a Mom and Pop restaurant, they say, you should spend 80 per cent of your time working on the nuts and bolts of how you make the right quality product at the right price. That seems about right for the […] Read more
Editor’s Note: Reading about you at the airport
Masses of business books get sold at airports, complete with cover photos of business execs, Harvard profs, and HR consultants, but never a farmer. Maybe that should change
Reading Time: 2 minutes I’ve mentioned once or twice in past that I’ve toyed with the idea of Country Guide publishing a series of business books based on the strategic insights we glean from the farmers in our stories. And just to be clear… I don’t mean books for farmers to read. I mean books that would be of […] Read more
Editor’s Note: Something changed exactly a decade ago
It was 10 years ago this month that a small group of us met in Winnipeg to start talking about how we would transform Country Guide into a business journal for farmers.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Or, more accurately, it was 10 years ago this month that we got serious about whether it might make sense to even try such a thing. The answer wasn’t at all obvious. When we got asked, “Will anyone read you?” (which, naturally, was the question that had to be asked) we couldn’t really say anything […] Read more
Editor’s Note: The other side of the success story
At Country Guide, we do get criticized for seeming to print only stories about successes, not failures, but we don’t get as much flak as you might think… and we all know the reason why
Reading Time: 2 minutes You can see it again in the lineup of stories we bring you in our March 1 issue of Country Guide. For the next generation of Canada’s farmers, “average” won’t cut it. Our future farmers must run farms that score an A if not an A+ in every category… or they will face tall odds against […] Read more
Editor’s Note: ‘Big’ plans for summer in the city
Swift Current is still a fine place. Brandon is too, and so are London, Kingston, Lethbridge and Prince Albert, along with an atlas full of other small cities across Canada. But…
Reading Time: 2 minutes … they just don’t come up to the mark, at least in this one important way. Even Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Edmonton fall short, partly because you feel too comfortable in them. Nor does even Calgary make the list, although that’s OK because Ottawa doesn’t get on it either. Canadians have built three of the world’s […] Read more
Editor’s Note: A season for deciding on new goals for the farm
Farmers stand out in today’s culture for their ability to make actual decisions, not just choices. Now the rewards for choosing which decisions to make are about to multiply
Reading Time: 2 minutes I know I’m a broken record on this subject, and that I’m forever saying that if there’s anything I’d like consumers to really understand about today’s farmers, it’s how they excel at decision making. It’s foreign to consumers, who excel in their own way at making choices, such as which pairs of jeans send which […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
