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Farm kids often get plenty of experience on the production side of the business, but aren’t taught about budgeting or financial statements.
Guide Business

How to make your kids more financially literate

Don’t overlook how powerful it is to teach your children about managing money on the farm

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Reading Time: 4 minutes Financial literacy is essential for everyone, but it is particularly critical for farmers. Defined as “the ability to use knowledge and skills to manage financial resources effectively for a lifetime of financial well-being,” it’s a must in modern agriculture. Parents agree. They want their children to be financially independent. Yet Stephanie Szusz, who works in […] Read more
Increasing costs related to farming are making your decisions more important and sometimes more difficult as well.
Guide Business, Management

Farm fit

Maybe the phrase “Standardized Financial Benchmarks for Canadian Farm Financial Statements” doesn’t instantly get your blood pumping. But read on. Could this be the tool that lets you control your future?

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Reading Time: 8 minutes Like many others, Larry Martin is convinced that Canada’s agriculture is evolving far faster than anyone driving a few miles of country sideroad could guess. The scenery hasn’t changed. At least, it hasn’t been transformed. It’s still a patchwork of crisp farmsteads and open fields, and of barns and bins. But those who live here […] 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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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
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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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[...]
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It cost him his ’67 Cougar, and it wasn’t the only time he’d get burned, but Dennis Pashovitz feels his farm emerged stronger for the lesson.
Guide Business, Marketing

Taking on the market

Options, futures or forward contracts? Two farmers search for sustainable income

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Reading Time: 9 minutes Options, futures or forward contracts? Two farmers search for sustainable income Dennis Pashovitz calls it his ’67 Cougar moment. It was the late 1990s and the grain farmer at Arelee, an hour west of Saskatoon, needed cash to open a trading account. The only way to learn about marketing, he was convinced, was to play[...]
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Spouses are realizing that farm operations require a much more structured business planning approach.
Guide Business

Between spouses

Formalizing the informal partnership

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Reading Time: 3 minutes Joint ownership between spouses has been a long-standing fixture in the farming community, with each holding equal influence when it comes to making key business decisions. It is widely acknowledged and recognized that spouses are key influencers in business decisions. They have always stood front and centre in financial negotiations, are equal participants in professional[...]
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General

Seven summer financial bottlenecks

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In biz-speak, a bottleneck is a point of congestion that causes delays or inefficiencies, leading to higher costs. It’s a perfect metaphor for farm finances at a time of year when the bottle we’d rather be thinking about might have something cold in it, with us sitting on a dock. Yet summer is a too-good-to-miss[...]
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Guide Business, Opinion

Advisor vs. adviser

Are you sure you should trust the person who is advising you on your financial future?

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Reading Time: 7 minutes Life, business and farming are all becoming increasingly complicated. As a result, individuals in every walk of life, including farmers, are turning to advisers for help. The public has an expectation that these advisers are highly trained, that they are experts in their field, and that they will work in the best interests of the[...]
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Guide Business

It’s called FarmWorks

This innovative investment fund is creating a new model for getting financial help into the hands of farmers who can make a difference

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Reading Time: 6 minutes One of the highest tides in the world enters Jennifer and Kevin Graham’s front yard twice a day. Their 30-acre farm near the seaside village of Kingsport, N.S., runs down to the Minas Basin, an inlet of the Bay of Fundy. This area, like the entire stretch of the Annapolis Valley, is peppered with farms[...]
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AgCanadaTV

AGCanadaTV: In Case You Missed It – Your National Ag News Recap for the week ending May 22, 2020.

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