Category: Farm Management

By Shaun Haney It has always been the practice in agriculture if more than one sibling decides to take over the family farm that the farm will be split into separate entities. I know that in my own family's case in the late seventies, my grandfather and his brother split the farm into two separate... Read More

By Shaun Haney Agriculture has some untouchable topics that we are just not supposed to talk about. One of them is dealing with aging farm workers. On the farm we are taught to respect our elders but in some cases in agriculture we take this to high levels of absurdity. Recently, in northern Alberta a... Read More

There and many different reasons for a company to want to make the "big deal." Some are looking for efficiency, some strive for an increase in scope, and others just see the value at certain levels. Lately the agri-business sector is under intense media coverage with the running and gunning in the marketplace by company's... Read More

Many people look at services like Google from just the front end which is search. Google is really more about the back end application of data. The search engine allows them to collect infinite bytes of data so that they can make advertising revenue from the searcher. The better the data set that Google has... Read More

When we think about the threat to family farms we might talk about industry consolidation, farm commodity depreciation, access to qualified workers, rising input costs or market volatility. All of these things are threats to the survival of Canadian family farms but maybe the biggest threat was not included in this above list. In my... Read More

The Canadian Dollar is known as a commodity currency but as of late the European Union financial situation is playing havoc with the Canadian currency. Many feedyard and cattle ranchers are really getting stressed out by how violently the dollar has moved in the recent months. As we have mentioned before on this website, it... Read More

When we read about innovation in business magazines we commonly see companies like Apple that produce cool gadgets and personal devices. We frequently see car companies or advertising agencies with flashy designs or cool strategies getting recognized for innovation but why not agriculture? What do you think? As a farmer do you consider yourself innovative?... Read More

By Shaun Haney With the advancing average age of the North American farmer we have a critical situation at hand. We need to get more young people in the business of farming. Now I am not talking about getting more young people into the ag-industry. I am talking about getting them on the farm and... Read More

So far in 2010, the only decision being made on farms is to be indecisive. It has been an unbelievable spring of yes...no...maybe...no....yes....i have no idea!!! Sometimes I wish that farmers had the decisiveness of cattlemen in their unshattered confidence that things will get better and having conviction is allowable. The early cropping favourites in... Read More

  At the Syngenta G32 Summit I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Allan Gray from Purdue University. With the increased volatility in the marketplace producers must be much more aware and conscious of the risk dynamics. I have always found that risk is a very difficult topic to discuss because everyone has a different... Read More