For 20 years, Len Davies has been helping Canadian farm families develop and implement farm succession plans. Over two decades, Davies and his Ontario-based Davies Legacy Planning Group have helped 600 farm families navigate the succession process. Farm Management Canada acknowledged Davies’ efforts by awarding him the 2019 Wilson Loree Award at its recent Agricultural… Read More
Category: AgExcellence
As we move in to a new year and new farm season, there are all kinds of things that need to be assessed, reassessed, and evaluated. If setting business goals for the year ahead is on your to-do list, you may want to consider joining a formal peer group. If the idea of sharing farm… Read More
It’s nice to receive recognition from your peers. It is particularly nice when your peers are also your friends and the recognition occurs in a place of special emotional significance. All these things came together for Elaine Froese during last week’s Agriculture Excellence Conference held at Winnipeg, Man. It was in the ballroom of the… Read More
Many changes come as a result of crisis of one sort or another. Sometimes the threat is obvious, like an across-the-industry drop in revenue, and sometimes it can be more subtle and fly under the radar. Farm Management Canada came into being in 1992 in response to a financial crisis that was facing the agriculture… Read More
For as long as we have a supply management system, there will be debates about whether or not we should keep it. The line between for and against is predictable: dairy, egg, chicken, and turkey farmers and those with collective-leaning politics want to keep it, non-supply-managed farmers and free-market thinkers want it gone. Or so… 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
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
Borrowing at 0% interest is about as good as it gets. When only 20% of producers are using available cash advance programs, like the one administered by the Canadian Canola Growers, you have to question why more farmers are not taking advantage of effective borrowing programs. According to David Derwin, of PI Financial, only 5 to 10%… Read More
Every market needs a buyer and a seller. In the big commodities, there can be many stakeholders in between the two most important entities. What if the middlemen were removed to actually directly connect buyers and sellers around the world? This is the goal of Agriprocity, founded by Nicole Rogers and based in Dubai. The… Read More
Another Ag Excellence conference is in the books. It was actually the first one that I have ever attended and it was a great time. One of the unique aspects of the conference is that there is such a wide swath of producers in terms of the Canadian geography but also genre of production. From… Read More
For farmers, buying land can be the biggest business decision you make. It’s also a tremendously emotional decision that many famers make without fully considering all the ramifications, explains Alberta Agriculture farm financial specialist Rick Dehod. “Is it a need or a want?” asks Dehod, who says many times buying land is what farmers want,… Read More
What’s your farm’s liquidity? If you know, do you think it’s enough? Could you be missing out on opportunities because of a lack of liquidity? Access to working capital, or liquidity, is just one measure of a farm’s business that can be an indicator of how competitive a farm can be, says Terry Betker, president and… Read More
What management practices and behaviours make farmers more financially successful? A report commissioned by the Agri-Food Management Institute and Farm Management Canada attempts to answer this question. “With the Dollars and Sense study we’re trying to determine what makes a leading farmer. How do they end up in the top 25% of farmers versus the… Read More
If you’ve been attending agricultural conferences in the past few years, you’ve likely heard the phrase “social license to operate.” It essentially boils down to the approval of a certain industry by local communities and public stakeholders. With new regulations affecting farms, maintaining social license has become a priority for modern agriculture. At the 2015 Agricultural… Read More
The little rectangular digital displays we carry in our pockets could become obsolete in the not-too-distant future. Instead, the images and information that we squint to see on our phones and other physical screens might be projected into whatever setting we’re in. “Cinematic” or “augmented” reality is the terminology used to describe what companies are creating by inserting virtual content into a… Read More