If drought concerns, disease pressure, or low commodity prices have you scratching your head on crop rotation tweaks, Alberta farmers have access to two, free crop planning and profitability programs offered by the provincial agriculture department. The first program, Crop Choice$, allows farmers to input their own costs and yield expectations, and is also fully… Read More
Category: Finance
Precision agriculture company Farmers Edge has plans to disrupt the crop insurance industry, announcing an agreement with global reinsurer PartnerRe on Tuesday. The four-year deal will see Farmers Edge and PartnerRe jointly develop new agriculture insurance products based on field data that Farmers Edge already collects for agronomic reasons. “For the longest time we’ve been… Read More
Low unemployment, major tax cuts, and looming trillion dollar deficits — the U.S. economy is hot, with growing concerns that it may be at risk of over-heating. Increasing odds of higher inflation and interest rates have stoked a pullback and volatility in the stock market after the Dow climbed to record highs in late January. The… Read More
Resilience is defined as the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. Agility refers to an ability to move quickly and easily. In a farm business, resilience and agility go hand-in-hand with liquidity and working capital — the ability to put up cash in a short amount of time. “Those are the kind of metrics we… Read More
The federal government has decided to not make any changes to how it treats deferred cash purchase tickets for grain after proposing in the 2017 budget to potentially eliminate the option. Many farm groups voiced their opposition to the idea of dropping the income tax deferral mechanism during consultations held in spring and early summer…. Read More
How often do you stop and take time to evaluate how well your farm business is performing? And how do you determine whether an area of the business is performing well or needing improvement? The first step in benchmarking a farm’s financial performance is to compare it to itself, to understand historical performance. From there,… Read More
The dust is starting to settle after Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s flurry of announcements backtracking on the federal government’s proposed small business tax changes. Now that the news conferences are over and we’ve had a few days to analyze the changes to the changes, how will the updates affect farm businesses? First of all, we… Read More
Agriculture Minister Lawrence MacAulay continues to downplay the potential impact of the Liberals’ proposed tax changes, despite widespread concerns voiced by many farmers, small business owners and their accountants. The minister took 10 minutes to sit down with RealAgriculture in his office in the Confederation Building on Parliament Hill this week to discuss the tax… Read More
The federal government wants to clamp down on incorporated business owners who it says are claiming capital gains when they should be reporting taxable income or dividends. A capital gain is essentially the increase in the value of a capital asset, such as farmland, above its purchase price. Under Canada’s tax system, only 50 percent… Read More
Members of Parliament are back at their seats for the fall sitting of Parliament, and tensions are high, with the Conservatives and NDP questioning the Liberals’ proposed tax changes announced in July. Farm groups and farmers have also been vocal in criticizing the government’s plan. “I don’t think the government realized the opposition that would… Read More
There’s a reason most farms pay accountants to provide tax planning advice. Taxes are complicated. Add multiple pages of new information, unclear definitions, ‘tax cheat’ accusations, some emotional rhetoric, and it’s a challenge, even for accountants, to assess what Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s proposed tax changes could mean for an individual farm business. We’re going… Read More
With farmers, farm organizations, and accounting firms that work in agriculture voicing serious concerns about the federal government’s proposed tax changes, Agriculture Minister Lawrence MacAulay broke his media silence on the subject on Friday afternoon. For all of 50 seconds. The Full Story: Facing the politically dangerous choice of siding with the farm community or… Read More
I’m fortunate enough to get to meet all kinds of farmers. Usually when we meet, the conversation is a standard one. What’s the weather been like or how is the harvest going? Politics, just like sex and religion, is usually left out of it. Until recently. Farmers keep bringing it up in their conversations. That… Read More
Agriculture ministers from across Canada say they reached an agreement in St. John’s today on the core elements of the next agriculture policy framework, which will be called the “Canadian Agricultural Partnership.” CAP is a five-year $3 billion federal-provincial-territorial funding agreement that will replace the current framework, known as Growing Forward 2, which expires at the… Read More
Risk — a four letter word that drives farmers crazy. As farmers, our chances of success are greatest when we know the risks we’re exposed to and have mitigated risks that are in our control. To help us dive deeper into the topic of risk – specifically business risk and financial risk – RealAgriculture’s Shaun… Read More