Reading Time: 8 minutes A mile from the Ottawa River, the McGregor family has lived and farmed, and they have loved and built for five generations, to the point where their produce business has mushroomed to 15 stands, a pick-your-own business and four farmers’ markets. Theirs is a story about embracing change, and about how, in the midst of […] Read more
One Ontario family’s joint path to farm succession
“Succession planning here is like hitting a moving target,” says Jim McGregor, but it’s also the family’s greatest opportunity
A team approach to farm succession
Getting their advisers to meet and work together as a team is helping drive the Tilstras’ succession planning
Reading Time: 7 minutes When Ted Tilstra imagined his retirement, he knew that he wanted it to continue to include having a coffee around the kitchen table with his brother and nephews. Tilstra Bros. have been running their parents’ dairy farm in Dunnville, Ont., for nearly 25 years. Together Don and Ted are milking 100 purebred Holstein cattle and […] Read more
Taking the first steps in succession planning
Reading Time: 2 minutes Are you getting more and more convinced that it’s time for succession planning for your own farm? If so, here are some thoughts from the experts on how to get started, beginning with the most important question of all: What does our retirement look like? “The retiring couple has to have a focused discussion on […] Read more
Are Canadian farmers ready for the succession challenge?
HR toolkit designed to assist farmers with transition and to help ensure the farm's continued success
Reading Time: 6 minutes Succession planning has become a pretty sexy topic in agriculture. Every hip and trendy professional office for farmers is mailing out their own shiny leaflet to everyone they know about it, and no self-respecting event planner would even think of hosting an agricultural conference without at least one workshop on transferring the farm to the […] Read more
Heritage on the move
How to keep farm and family together when you uproot after 170 years on the same ground
Reading Time: 7 minutes Farm succession is never easy, but for the Johnston family, bringing the next generation into the dairy business has meant extra challenges. You might even say it has meant miles and miles of challenges. After their family had farmed near Brampton for 170 years, Frances and James Johnston figured the time had come. Toronto was […] Read more
Co-op succession?
The lack of succession planning helps explain why so many co-ops are being sold, and why even more are in danger
Reading Time: 6 minutes The only thing farmers seem to do better than growing vast amounts of grain seems to be selling off ownership of the industry, especially in the West. In February of this year, Parrish and Heimbecker purchased the 112,000-tonne farmer-owned Weyburn Inland Terminal. Just a month earlier, Viterra bought the 42,000-tonne Lethbridge Inland Terminal that had […] Read more
Take a detour?
For some farms, there are big wins when the next generation gets work experience off the farm before coming back home
Reading Time: 7 minutes Take a look across the country and you’ll see myriad ways that farmers become farmers, and just about as many opinions on the right way and the wrong way to go about it. Good farm succession advice is abundant, as well as checklists to work through, seminars to attend, and even government resources to help […] Read more
Turn around
When brothers Ryan and Noel Flitton signed up for business school with their father, it helped their Alberta farm turn a critical corner
Reading Time: 9 minutes The allure of farming runs strong in the Flitton family, so neither Gary Flitton nor his sons Noel or Ryan make any apology for having been drawn for the same reason back to the family’s 12,000 acres of scenic Alberta grain land east of the Rocky Mountains near Vulcan. They want to live a rural […] Read more
You want to fire Dad?
There's almost always a better solution, says our panel of experts. Try these strategies to get everyone living happily together again
Reading Time: 5 minutes It’s a movie standard. When the mob turns angry, they start wielding pitchforks. Whether it’s a monster that incites them or an invading army, when the local population goes berserk, and when they suddenly get transformed into nightmarish creatures of violence, the first thing they reach for is the nearest farm implement. It’s a scene […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
