May 17, 2012

AMI Ep 8 – Financial Monitoring – Building a Financial Dashboard

farm business eteam

Knowing where you’re at as a business is a critically important component in making good business decisions. Building a financial dashboard gives you one of the most singularly important tools to be able to do that. A financial dashboard gives you a quick overview of the financial history of your business. It gives you a [...]

AMI Episode 7 Financial Software – Finding the Right Fit For You

farm business eteam

Choosing financial software for your business is a custom fit kind of operation. There are a number of things to consider when you make that choice that are uniquely tied to your business, allowing you to expand and grow without having to switch programs. Ideally, your software should be as customizable as your business. With [...]

AMI Episode 3 – Cost of Production (COP) – Using COP to Your Business Advantage

farmer calculator

Have you ever been to a farm meeting and there is a speaker talking about the cost of production?  Do you ever feel like they are speaking no different than the teacher in Charlie Brown? Farming is business and businesses need to know their cost of production.  Guessing your cost per acre is just not [...]

Is The First Generation Farmer a Thing of the Past?

Kevin Serfas Picture

Over the past couple of days, I have been reading and seeing a bunch of different articles in relation to keeping young farmers on the farm and attracting first generation farmers. My question? Why is it any different than any other entrepreneurial business. I’m sure that there are tens of thousands of people across Canada [...]

Farm Business E-Team Ep 2 – Road Map – Planning for the Year Ahead

eteam

Have you ever heard the saying, “hope is not a plan.” This is a great saying that is very applicable in agriculture. It is very critical to ensure that you are creating the proper roadmap. This should include projections on production, prices and yields. This also includes plans for capital expenditures in the coming year. [...]

Farm Business E-Team Ep 1 – Post Mortem: A Review of Last Year’s Business

eteam

Farming is a unique business. It involves every aspect of business you can imagine from shovelling to marketing. It’s that diversity that can make successful farming a challenge. Many farmers may be good at one or two aspects of the buiness but not so good at the others. This can have devastating consequences if you’re trying [...]

Canadian Farm Values Continue to Rise in FCC Study – J.P. Gervais – FCC

We have all heard the saying, “what goes up must come down,” but does that maybe not apply to land values? This week FCC released its newest version of the Farm Credit Canada Farmland Values Report and the results continue to verify the upward trend of land values.  It is becoming ever more difficult to [...]

Wheat School- 7 Steps to Analyzing the Wheat Market – John DePutter

For a lot of farmers marketing wheat can be a lot like playing “Let’s Make a Deal”. You pick what’s behind door number one and hope it’s better than what’s behind doors two and three. It’s guesswork and a lot of luck. For other farmers, it feels like you’re preparing to write a thesis, with [...]

Ontario Land Rental Rates Are Rising to Record Highs

When agricultural commodity prices rise there are expected effects. Costs like fertilizer prices and machinery costs are always natural to rise in a rising commodity market. One of the costs that has not been discussed much is rising farmland rent costs. Ontario has some of the highest land rent rates in Canada for the major [...]

Producers Are Looking for Growth in 2011 – Denton McGregor, FCC.

In the short term the financial picture for agriculture looks very good.  Both farmers and livestock producers are very excited about the possibilities in 2011.  With profit comes bullish behaviours of expansion and growth.  In different areas of Western Canada there has been some reports of very steamy land rental rates based on the prices [...]