I was in a conference call around access to mental health services last month, and a question came up that I'm sure a great many of us have considered: what can we do to break down stigma in our communities? Now, there are many ways we can go about breaking down stigma (worthy of a... Read More
Category: Farm Management
Farmers from Saskatchewan and Quebec were named Canada's Outstanding Young Farmers for 2017 during the national OYF program in Penticton, BC this past weekend. Derek and Tannis Axten and Véronique Bouchard and Francois Handfield received the national recognition on Friday night. The Axtens operate a no-till grain farm with a unique emphasis on soil health... Read More
Substance dependency is often reported as — and thought of as — an urban issue. Statistics blur the issue, showing high numbers of dependency, and, sadly, death, in areas of greater population. But addiction is not isolated to people who live in cities. From alcohol to tobacco to what we'll focus on in this post,... Read More
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
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