Canada’s leading advocate for mental health awareness in agriculture, University of Guelph veterinary medicine professor Andria Jones-Bitton, is in high demand at farm meetings to speak about her ground-breaking research results. Through her studies over the past three years, she’s discovered an abnormally high rate of depression and other mental illnesses among farmers (and veterinarians).... Read More
Category: Farm Management
This week the Ontario government passed Bill 148, the Fair Workplaces Better Jobs Act. Among other changes to workplace laws, it will mean an increase in the province's minimum wage, from $11.60 to $14 on January 1, and $15 on the same day in 2019. With other provinces potentially following suit, the potential impacts are... Read More
For some, technology like autonomous tractors and unmanned aerial vehicles offer great interest; for others, the quick advancements in robotics and data are overwhelming and intimidating. Will we soon see job losses? Will human presence on farms be made obsolete? Not at all, says Christine Su, co-founder and CEO of PastureMap, a company that makes... 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
Can you have too much grain storage on farm? Is on-farm grain storage a trap to procrastinate in marketing your crop? Depending on where you farm, what's the ideal amount of grain storage relative to your annual crop production? On-farm grain storage has always been a necessity on the prairies, but capacity is growing in... Read More
In 1992, the Canadian Psychiatric Association established Mental Illness Awareness Week (MIAW) to highlight the impact of mental illness to the Canadian public, and promote recovery. The Canadian Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health (CAMIMH) now coordinates the week in collaboration with its member organizations and other supporters. This year, MIAW runs from October... 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