The future, though, is a little scary.

“There’s definitely a lot of noise out there right now,” said Darren Bond, a farm management specialist with Manitoba Agriculture.

Both fertilizer and fuel prices have shot up since missiles fired by the U.S. and Israel started falling in Iran. Sea traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — through which 20 per cent of global oil and gas travels — has been choked in response to the conflict, while a number of key oil and gas facilities in the Gulf have been hit by military strikes, also shuttering fertilizer facilities. Farm Credit Canada says the Middle East accounts for about 12 per cent of nitrogen production, and almost a quarter of the world’s global trade.

On March 19, Reuters reported that benchmark Brent crude oil prices ended the day at US$109 a barrel, and quoted Goldman Sachs estimates, which warned that the price could smash its 2008 record of $147.50 if tensions didn’t ease.

Markets have tightened further with news that Russian fertilizer exports are bumping up against a ceiling and China will be pulling back its exports, in an effort to protect its domestic supply as global supplies are squeezed.

U.S. urea futures jumped by roughly US$130 per tonne, or nearly 30 per cent, within two days of the conflict in Iran ramping up Feb. 28, according to a Farm Credit Canada (FCC) web post March 9.

Why spring fertilizer timing got complicated

Back in January, during Manitoba Ag Days in Brandon, farmers were already warned not to wait on fertilizer purchases. Parrish & Heimbecker’s head of market analysis, Tyler Freeman, told farmers that the usual price downswing hadn’t happened in summer 2025.

That was before the conflict in Iran intensified at the end of February.

The suddenly tighter margins and sky-high volatility risk have sharpened focus on cost-of-production as farmers gear up for a higher-risk production year.

“We need to … put that uncertainty as much as we can to the side and think with cold, hard numbers,” Bond said. “Once we start doing that, we start coming up with our plan. A lot of times our stress will dissipate.”

Planning remains the best defence

Cost-of-production budgets should be treated as working documents, updated continuously as projected costs turn into actual figures throughout the season, according to Bond.

“It’s not something that just gets touched once and then pushed to the side of the desk,” he said.

Using real numbers helps producers identify potential profitability challenges early, giving them more time to adjust. That approach also helps reduce the risk of making decisions based on fear rather than data.

“The earlier on in the season that we can identify that we might have a profitability issue, the more time that we’ll have to either make changes or make provisions,” Bond said.

Who’s exposed and when it hits

Farmers that already have their fuel and fertilizer in hand will be spared the first wave of the spiked markets.

Depending on how long war-driven trade disruptions stretch though, that financial wall may still be waiting the next time they need to buy inputs.

“This looks to be more of an issue for those who haven’t priced fertilizer yet … and going into a next year issue, or even, like, this fall,” Bond said.

Fertilizer availability typically varies across the country this time of year.

A 2022 RealAgristudies survey, later cited by FCC, found that more than half of Prairie farms have usually secured their spring fertilizer by late-March.

In contrast, only 17 per cent of Quebec producers and 10 per cent in Ontario had done the same, while none of the surveyed Atlantic Canadian farms reported having fertilizer on hand.

Statistics Canada data shows a similar divide today, with urea inventories in Western Canada at their highest levels in a decade, while Eastern Canada sits at its lowest since 2017.

Fertilizer movement typically peaks in April and May. Any disruption to shipping or supply chains during that window could still create localized shortages or price spikes.

Timing purchases have been complicated by the global uncertainty, Bond noted.

“As we’ve seen with the world events and world news, things change pretty quick,” he said.

If things do ease in the Middle East, relaxing pressure on global fertilizer supply, that could just as quickly improve the situation for farmers who still have to lock in fertilizer. Or things could get worse.

Depending on how many farmers waited to buy their spring fertilizer, that could add further pressure on supply.

Fertilizer shipments leaving the Middle East now, may not reach North America until May, potentially forcing adjustments in application timing or rates.

Cost pressures raising the stakes

The current headlines are attention-grabbing, but Bond said there’s been less dramatically visible issue swelling in the background.

Production costs in general have risen steadily over the past several years. At St. Jean Farm Days earlier this year, Bond said farmers are facing much higher inflation costs than the already high rates experienced by the average Canadian in the last five years.

According to Bond, general inflation in the broader economy rose about 20 per cent between 2020 and 2025, but “the numbers that we see … shows that farm level inflation in that five-year period is more around that 50 per cent.”

That shift has fundamentally changed the risk profile for producers. Five years ago, a farm might have spent roughly $500 per acre to generate $50 per acre in profit. Today, that same return may require $700 to $750 per acre in costs.

“It takes more money to generate the same returns,” Bond said. “So that creates more risk.”

Fertilizer is one of the most significant input costs on Manitoba farms, and Bond stressed that any increase in price or misstep in application can quickly erode already thin margins

And unlike the market conditions seen in 2022, when high commodity prices helped offset rising input costs, current forecasts suggest farmers may have less cushion this year.

FCC estimates that a 40 per cent increase in nitrogen prices could cut average Saskatchewan margins for a wheat-canola rotation roughly in half, from about $50 per acre to $25 per acre.

The post Fertilizer prices are spiking — here’s what Manitoba farmers need to know before seeding appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

That’s according to Farm Credit Canada chief economist Desmond Sobool during FCC’s most recent economic outlook, Jan 22.

FCC expects farmers will see another jump in their bills this year. Its farm cost projections expect overall expenses to rise four per cent in 2026 over the previous year.

“If you look back to 2019, which is kind of our base pre-pandemic year, overall farm expenses are up over 50 per cent since 2019,” Sobool said. “In comparison, inflation in Canada overall is up 20 per cent, so you can just see how much more significant the impact of inflation has been on farm expenses.”

WHY IT MATTERS: Canada’s economy, agriculture included, is till trying to navigate volatile seas when it comes to trade and geopolitics, affecting projected farmer profit margins, investment and growth prospects in the agriculture sector and more. However, Canadian cattle will continue a run of strong, stable prices.

Sobool’s most energizing message concerned Canada’s new agreement-in-principle with China, which promised to drop Chinese tariffs on Canadian canola seed from 76 per cent to 15 per cent by March and eliminate China’s tariff on Canadian canola meal (at least for 2026) and peas — a boon for the domestic canola crushing sector.

“(Producers) have some certainty that there will be market access for canola this year,” he said.

That was before U.S. President Donald Trump threatened 100 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods if Canada makes a trade pact with China. The U.S. is Canada’s biggest canola customer, worth about $7.7 billion of oil, meal and seed exports.

Cattle wave still rolling

Sobool reported Canadian cow-calf producers and feedlots are set for another year of strong prices, driven in part by moderating feed costs.

Canadian cattle growers are finally seeing signals for expansion of the national herd, which steadily dropped over the drought years of the early 2020s.

The U.S., meanwhile, has its own challenges on herd retention. Heifer retention rates remain at a 75-year low, Sobool said.

Sobool also looked at the number of cows and heifers being sent to slaughter as a percentage of total animals to determine cattle herd trends. Once that percentage dips below 40 per cent, it’s a signal that the cattle herd is expanding. Canada’s percentage is currently at 41 per cent.

“In the U.S. it’s still about 49 per cent through 2025, so in the U.S., we’re still not seeing those market signals and so that’s going to continue to support prices.”

GDP slowdown

Canada’s economy is still growing, but FCC expects that growth to be slow.

The lender is forecasting Canada’s economic growth will slow from 1.7 per cent in 2025 to 1.2 per cent in 2026.

“I understand that what we’re saying here is quite different from consensus on interest rates, because most forecasters are predicting either no change to the overnight rate or even an increase later this year,” said Krishen Rangasamy, principal economist with FCC.

“That may well be the right forecast if the economy picks up materially. But … we think economic growth will weaken this year and if we’re correct about that additional stimulus by the central bank should not be ruled out.”

Uncertainty over the future of the soon-to-be-reviewed Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) will continue to be a limiting factor, Rangasamy said.

He suspects Canadian exporters in CUSMA’s tariff-free categories such as farm, fishing and intermediate food products have felt above-expected tariff impacts due to confusion over rules of origin requirements, losing their CUSMA compliance in the process.

“Remember that the majority of our exports to the U.S. is tariff-free thanks to CUSMA, and yet, outside of the energy sector, our exporters have really struggled since the U.S. tariffs were imposed,” he noted.

Tariffs placed on Canadian goods have caused U.S. importers to look elsewhere. This has caused Canada’s share of the U.S. market to drop to 11 per cent — its lowest ever — in 2025.

Diversified trade

Although Rangasamy considers Canada’s attempts to diversify trade partners commendable, he was disappointed in the country’s apparent inability to “materially reduce” dependence on the U.S., in light of its 15 free trade agreements with 51 countries.

“We’re not capitalizing on opportunities presented by those trade deals,” he said, citing ignored opportunities presented by the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA).

That agreement was designed to offer Canadian businesses preferential access to the EU market. But some expected big winners when the deal was first inked have failed to see major gains, particularly meat sectors who say regulation conflicts continue to keep them out.

Leveraging the house

This year will also see a large share of Canadian households renewing mortgages at higher interest rates than their origination. According to Bank of Canada estimates, mortgage payments will increase by an average six per cent this year.

“Those households that are renewing their fixed-year, five-year mortgage — which, by the way, is the most popular mortgage product in the country. For those folks, payments will increase by about 20 per cent,” listeners heard.

If there’s a bright spot for Canada, Rangasamy said it’s the federal government’s new focus on ambitious public projects that could rekindle business investment. But don’t expect big results too soon.

“It’s probably not a 2026 story. It’s probably something more like next year or even 2028.”

The post Farm Credit Canada forecasts higher farm costs for 2026 appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

If anyone knows how to keep financial and other documents in order, it’s Lacey Frizzell. Her consulting business helps farmers and businesses organize their financial information, then set up systems to keep it organized.

“Farmers are unique,” says Frizzell. “There’s a lot of information being thrown at us from a variety of sources, which makes it very hard to keep organized.”

WHY IT MATTERS: Tax season isn’t that far away. A good record keeping system can ease farmer headaches.

Don’t file it unless you really need to keep it, she advised.

Will anyone on your farm management team look at it again? Is it relevant for legal or financial reasons? “What is the purpose?” Frizzell asked.

Usually, the purpose is the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).

Generally, the CRA requires businesses to keep records on hand for six years. That is, six years after the end of the last tax year they relate to. If your farm’s year-end is Dec. 31, as of January 2026, you should be storing records from as far back as your 2019 fiscal year. If your farm’s year-end is Oct. 31, by January 2026 you should still have records around from your 2018-19 fiscal year.

This covers most expenses and income, but paperwork related to capital purchases should be kept even longer. Keep receipts for anything that would be relevant if you sold or wound down your farm. This includes any land or equipment showing the book value (i.e., initial purchase price). Selling buildings, quota or any equipment you’ve been depreciating has tax consequences — and the CRA might ask for original purchase documents.

The bottom line: you don’t need to keep everything, but check with your accountant if you’re not sure.

Paper or pixels?

Once you’ve decided to keep that receipt, you have to decide if you’ll file it as paper or as a digital record. Both have downsides. If you choose a paper system, you’ll be printing out email attachments and bank transfer notifications. If you choose digital, you’ll be scanning many paper receipts.

Frizzell loves technology, but she uses a paper-based system. “I still recommend that people print everything because paper is still seemingly king,” she said.

First, she says, technology is never 100 per cent reliable. Hard drives fail. USB sticks get lost. Cloud services have storage limits and generally there is an annual fee associated with the service.

Your technology can also become obsolete. If you’re storing receipts through an online bookkeeping program, what if the software company goes out of business? If you change bookkeeping programs, will you still be able to view scanned invoices from past years? Will the records always be readily available and easy to locate?

“I would love to be more enthusiastic about digital record-keeping,” says Frizzell. “I’m just finding that there’s no live technology that you own as an individual, without paying a subscription.”

A third potential problem is the safety of your digital information. “Is your information being shared on someone else’s platform? I caution people on what information they want to share.” In a worst-case scenario, a hacker may have access to all your digital information.

If you do keep your records online, Frizzell recommends working with your local technology guru to set up appropriate firewalls and anti-virus programs.

Rules are for everyone

No matter where your records are stored, a good bookkeeping system has a set of standard operating procedures (SOPs) followed by everyone on the farm.

For example, make sure you know where originals are. “Ultimately there should be one central location where records are held,” Frizzell said. “Especially for audit purposes and recall.”

Some bookkeeping programs allow more than one person to upload scanned receipts and invoices straight into the software. This is convenient for employees picking up parts or materials; they can scan and upload their receipts before they come home from town. But where will you have them store the original paper copies?

With more than one person inputting information, bookkeeping can become messy. If one person uploads receipts from the local “Co-op” and another adds invoices from the “Coop,” your books could show two separate input providers. It’s important to set up standard procedures or make sure the bookkeeper has an eye on things.

It’s also important to have a backup plan for your bookkeeper. If something happens to them, can someone else access your financial records?

Your farm, your plan

The best system is the one that works for your farm and is kept up to date.

Accountants aren’t usually looking at your record-keeping (depending on the type of financial statements you need) but at your bookkeeping. Unless your financial records will be professionally audited, you’re keeping records to serve requests from the CRA and your own managerial needs.

Since nobody but your farm team needs to see a lot of the information, you have an opportunity to develop an system perfect for you.

Decide who needs access to the books and the bank accounts. This will be unique to every farm. Some farms have just one manager; some have several. Sometimes limiting access to accounts can safeguard your finances.

Some staff might need access to your filing system, maybe to check receipts or invoices. But, Frizzell says, “Not all employees need access to everything.” Some bookkeeping programs use password protection to restrict access to some information while still allowing staff to access specific files.

On some farms, several members of the management team might want to access the bookkeeping system. As a farm manager herself, Frizzell says, “I would strongly urge to see paper copies of invoices.”

Frizzell files her paper copies by date and by enterprise (for her, that means separating the cattle bills from the cropping bills). She also keeps separate files for invoices and receipts that they access more frequently.

Large farms might have a chief financial officer. Even small farms though typically have just one person in charge of financial record-keeping. Sometimes, a second person might be actually paying the bills. Frizzell prefers a “check and balance system.”

This could mean one person writes the cheques and a second person reviews them, or it could mean requiring two signatures on each cheque.

As online bill payment becomes more common, Frizzell recommends using an online cash management service that allows you to set up a two-person system for these payments. For example, one person can prepare e-transfers, a second person must approve them. (If you’re looking into this, search for “two to sign” accounts, or “dual sign” accounts.)

Check and balance systems protect farms against the rare, unhappy situation where one partner so desperately needs cash that they resort to “borrowing” from the farm. These systems can also help reduce simple errors. Who hasn’t typed 47 when they meant 74? “A lot of things are human driven, and as humans, we do make errors,” says Frizzell.

Keep it current

Your system is only useful if it’s up to date. For large farms, this could mean inputting information daily. Smaller farms might opt for monthly. If regular bookkeeping sessions are not for you, your system may need a simplifying redesign, or maybe it’s time to hire a bookkeeper.

There are cost savings and benefits to good records.

Accountants typically charge by the hour. They will need less time to calculate taxes if your financial records are well-maintained and reasonably error-free. The horrors of a CRA audit also increase exponentially if your records are hard to find or not available.

Frizzell has found some farmers reluctant to pay for bookkeeping when they know they could do it themselves. But bookkeepers can also take on tasks like developing environmental farm plans, or making sure vegetable production is up to Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (GAAP) standards.

If you want to learn to do your own bookkeeping (or train someone new) could you pay your current bookkeeper to train you? There are also courses available.

“Some of it is pretty simple,” Frizzell says, “but then there’s things that you need to figure out like what capital cost allowance depreciation class does the gravity wagon go in or that new tractor.”

The post Winter downtime: Get your farm records together appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Regenerative tourism digs deep into the concept of leaving a community better than before you visited – not an easy task given the wide array of visitors and destinations, budgets and tastes.

Like agriculture, tourism has its hurdles. On the environmental side, the simple fact is that people will not give up flying. The focus then becomes improving air travel and ‘on the ground’ and ‘at sea’ practices to ensure everything that happens has a net benefit to the stakeholders, especially to the host community.

In a fascinating shift of perspective, the regenerative model was applied with acknowledgement that all systems, including tourism and agriculture, are living systems. Gone are the days when it was OK to simply visit a place. Now the focus is on how that visit enhances the community beyond economic generation. It is creation of a sense of place.

This social shift was highlighted by speaker and graduate student Agrim Banerjee, who believes community members are essentially the first visitors. That reset allows the destination provider to see the space through the eyes of those who live there.

Thinking of this from an agricultural perspective, we must first ask how we see our own space and the community in which we live, and then ask ourselves how we thrive and what a visitor to our sector or even our farm may see.

What is it they feel upon arrival and departure and how are we in ag going to embrace the trend that the public wants to be part of our regenerative story?

Perhaps the solution is not as elusive as we thought. Graduate student Veronica Santiago reintroduced the importance of values alignment in tourism and how that should drive every action.

It’s important to find the intersection of farm values with societal values. In travel, it lies in delivering a respectful and an authentic experience. This is what we want our visitors or customers to experience as well.

I loved the introduction at this conference of trashing the measuring stick and replacing it with a compass. With the compass, we focus on the destination, and for tourism and for agriculture, that is a shared value.

How we get there and what it looks like after we have visited or lived the experience is dependent upon our shared regenerative values.

Farms tend to work in isolation and do not leverage the secret power of connection. Tourism, more than any other industry, recognizes this as it must instantly connect with the 22 million persons who visit Canada each year.

The ultimate host provides both the platform for appreciation of regenerative practise and ensures that experience reflects this.

Ignoring the power of connection in any sector leads to the usual potholes, such as fragmentation, knee jerk policies, unclear mandates and even disaster. It is not affordable nor does it advance the sector.

Both sectors recognize the importance of this. I am part of the beef industry so I will use it as an example. Historically, the cow-calf producer has a degree of separation from the feedlot, but a million miles of separation from the packer and retailer. Only when the gaps are understood will regeneration occur.

Knowledge is our holy ground and storytelling is the medium in tourism and agriculture. I watched, breathless, as graduate student Raimundo Olivios Donoso let his images of the extreme Andes grip the crowd with the fever to partake and the solemn importance of leaving that vast space better after each visit.

The story was in the pictures and the message was clear on respecting not only the physical environment but the ancient culture.

In Canadian agriculture, we have yet to fully embrace storytelling as a way to connect with our customers and as a way to knit together our communities.

The value of storytelling is evident in the documentary Guardians of the Grasslands, winner of countless acknowledgements and five major film awards. It is a story beautifully told, but one might ask: Where are these places? How can visitors to the film or the space become allies for regenerative tourism and agriculture?

That film is the forward to an amazing world of all things agriculture and food; a story that we have yet to tell, and tell well.

So often our allies are found outside the fence lines in places we could not have imagined. Tourism told our unique Canadian story in different forms over this four-day event. The challenge now is to have the conversation on how we tell the story of agriculture and determine how we move ahead and embrace the shared values of two of Canada’s most powerful and potentially regenerative sectors.

The post Comment: Tourism can teach farming a thing or two appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Telus Agriculture and Rabo AgriFinance, which is headquartered in St. Louis and serves U.S. farm customers, announced Monday they’ve jointly bought software firm Conservis for an undisclosed sum.

Conservis comes to the joint venture already handling farmers’ financial reporting data via the Rabo AgriFinance platform since 2018, along with data from Climate Corp.’s Climate FieldView platform, the John Deere Operations Center and Crop Data Management Systems’ crop chemical database.

The Minneapolis company’s products are meant to allow a farmer to integrate as-applied and yield data directly from those platforms into a “unified view” of the business, with “no extra hardware or manual data re-entry required.”

Thus, “with all your activity records in one spot, you can decide to share reports with landowners, regulators and lenders using data directly from your fields at any point in the season,” Conservis says on its website.

“Understanding your true cost, including cost per bushel and per acre will help ensure you make informed decisions that yield higher profits.”

Calgary-based Telus Agriculture has been shopping for farm management platforms since before Telus created the new ag unit last year, among them Decisive Farming, Farm At Hand, Muddy Boots and Feedlot Health Management Services.

The joint owners said their vision for Conservis is to deliver an “even more robust” platform across a “diverse range of crops and livestock.”

For its part, Telus Ag’s existing tech portfolio is expected to “help enhance the Conservis platform’s functionality” and include access to Telus’ Agricultural Data Exchange (ADX) and Agricultural Services platform (ASX).

The new owners said they “remain committed to Conservis’ strict data privacy standards,” emphasizing farmers on Conservis will still own their data and will still control when partners — Rabobank and Telus Ag included — get that information. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

The post Telus, Rabobank ag arms buy into farm data aggregator appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

It’s how today’s small-scale farmers can do the same, says farmer and author Ben Hartman.

“Turning waste into useful channels should be the slogan of every farmer,” said Hartman, quoting George Washington Carver.

Using the principles of ‘Lean’ — a management model Toyota created — Hartman and his wife, Rachel Hershberger, gross a six-figure income off a little more than half an acre near Goshen, Indiana.

Hartman is author of The Lean Farm, and The Lean Farm Guide to Growing Vegetables. He spoke during the online Direct Farm Marketing Conference, held February 20 to 27.

In 1600s Japan, the isolationist Edo period, the country had to sustain itself agriculturally, said Hartman.

In that period, the population saw a large increase while the number of oxen available for agriculture dropped to almost none. Japanese farmers had to find ways to do more with less, said Hartman. They did this by getting together and reducing waste.

Transplanting rice is precise work done in a small time window. By forming collectives, they could plant each field in time.

They refashioned tools, previously animal powered, to be human powered. They engineered precise hand tools.

Today, some of the best small-farm hand tools still come from Japan, Hartman added.

After the Second World War, a bombed and gutted Japan would need the mentality of its efficient rice farmers. The Toyota car company was struggling to find parts to build, and buyers for its cars — at one point, it made three cars a week.

Embracing a precise, low-waste mindset, made Toyota a world leader (it led the world in sales in 2020, according to a January 28 report from Bloomberg).

As Hartman describes it, ‘lean’ recognizes two types of activity: work that contributes value and waste.

“There’s no three sides to the coin,” he said.

Waste includes transportation time, overstock of supplies, defective crops, motion or steps to a task, waiting and overproduction, said Hartman.

He identified four tools of ‘lean’: organizing, precise identification of value, cutting waste and practising continuous improvement.

A Mennonite, Hartman said he struggled to throw anything out, so his farm got cluttered.

Under ‘lean,’ a tool must either be in its place or in the worker’s hand, said Hartman. He suggested sorting tools — if they weren’t used last season, they probably wouldn’t be used this year. Pare tools down to the ones that get used.

Organize what’s left near where they’ll be used. The same goes for supplies.

Order must then be sustained. Hartman said on their farm, they post pictures of what each area looks like when clean. They and their employees can refer to these to know where everything goes.

The second tool of lean is precise identification of value. This is largely determined by “close personal observation to thoroughly understand a situation,” said Hartman.

For him, this means speaking to chefs, produce managers and customers he supplies. He asks what and how much they want, when they want it, and settles on an agreeable price. He lets customers take the lead, he said.

The third tool is cutting waste — identifying what adds value, and what is waste.

To cut down storage costs, Hartman said they aim to harvest and then deliver as soon as possible. As an urban farm, they can deliver within hours of harvest.

The farm began with a system of growing a cover crop, plowing this under as a ‘green manure’ and then planting. To reduce work significantly, they moved to a ‘mulch in place’ system.

They mow crops down, leaving the roots and residues in place. They may then tarp this to speed up breakdown of residue. They may add compost on the surface. They then plant directly without tillage.

Compost — produced using leaves from the nearby city — and crop residues are their only fertilizers and it works, said Hartman.

Hartman noted there is one other type of waste to be mindful of — overburdening. Every year they ask themselves where the burden of work was heaviest. Where did they hurt?

For instance, they realized they were wearing themselves out harvesting lettuce by hand so they got a tool to do that. Then they realized they were hurting their backs bending to use the tool. They added long handles.

The fourth tool is “Kaizen” or the practice of continuous improvement. This involves developing a routine or a mindset that promotes improvement. Every season the farm should have less waste, Hartman said.

Practise eliminating waste until it becomes a reflex, said Hartman.

Let your workers point out waste, he said. “They’re as close to the work and the waste as us,” said Hartman. “It makes sense that they’re going to have the best ideas.”

The post Ruthlessly cutting waste can allow small farms to prosper appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Hard work and skill are “actually the minimum standard,” said Dobson, a certified executive coach with Leadershift, and a farmer from Fairfax, Manitoba. “Who do you know in ag who doesn’t work hard?”

Leader effectiveness has an incredibly strong and well-documented correlation to success, Dobson said in a talk at the virtual Advancing Women in Agriculture Conference on November 24. However, personal growth in this area tends to be passed over in favour of production and technology growth.

While it’s probably no shocker that a well-led farm does better than a poorly led one, how much better a well-led business can perform can be hard to believe, said Dobson in an interview with the Co-operator.

One study showed that business leaders who scored in the top 25 per cent of effectiveness were likely to have businesses that had 15 to 20 per cent higher profit than the average business. Whereas those who scored at the very top of the effectiveness scale could have double the profits of the average business.

“(Being a good leader is) certainly better than being a bad leader… but if you really want your business to perform, what we know is that it’s better to be great, and significantly so,” said Dobson.

But what does that actually look like on farm?

“You’ll know you have bad leadership when… critical decisions or critical issues, whether they be challenges or opportunities, are not addressed front and centre,” said Dobson. “They’re not addressed immediately, that they’re put off to the side.”

Transition planning is the classic example, he added.

Employee turnover may be high, and it may be difficult to attract good workers. The farm may fail to grow because the farmer can’t bring him or herself to, or find a way to, hire employees.

The farmer may freeze under pressure or become reactive or rash.

An onlooker might say, “Why are they not doing anything?” said Dobson, or, “What the hell are they doing?”

Farms usually have far more critical external relationships than they might have had 25 years ago — farm advisers, accountants, lawyers, agronomists, banker, marketing advisers.

“The limiting factor is not the fact that we don’t have good tractors, we don’t have air drills that can plant seed evenly,” said Dobson. “The question now is that it’s a much bigger game… which one do I pick?”

The demand for farms to think and act strategically is significantly more than it was in the past, said Dobson. Even on a small farm, it takes significant effort to stay focused and on task with what’s important.

What Dobson advocates for through the National Farm Leadership Program, a farm-centred leadership development program which began in 2020, is to develop self-awareness, interpersonal skills, strategic thinking, performance, leadership effectiveness and a network of colleagues who are also committed to this kind of growth.

Along with coaching and accountability, this takes practice, said Dobson. He pushes for daily practice of a few minutes. What people should practice depends highly on their goals and needs, but it might include things as simple as taking a physical inventory — are they sleeping enough, eating or hydrating enough?

Many of the driven farmers who show up in his program are notorious meal skippers, said Dobson. That’s fine when they’re young, but when they get a little older the wheels come off a bit.

They may also spend time evaluating what they’re doing better today than they were the day before, reinforcing why they’re working on personal growth.

The person’s inner world needs to develop so they can be more successful in the outer world, said Dobson. This allows them to hear hard advice or face a challenging situation and be able to listen fully without getting defensive and to learn.

The post Leadership effectiveness critical to farm success appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

The Vancouver company, one of Canada’s “big five” telecommunications firms, on Thursday formally launched Telus Agriculture, billed as “a new business unit dedicated to providing innovative solutions to support the agriculture industry with connected technology.”

“From farm to fork, by digitizing the entire value chain and linking these technologies together for the first time, we will facilitate a secure exchange of information to allow farmers and ranchers, agribusiness organizations, the agrifood industry and the consumer to make smarter decisions,” Telus CEO Darren Entwistle said in a release.

The new unit is set up to serve three distinct markets, Telus Agriculture Canada CEO Chris Terris said in an interview, referring to production agriculture; agribusiness; and quality assurance and traceability in food and consumer packaged goods (CPGs).

Telus, whose acquisitions in ag tech and farm management consulting so far include Irricana, Alta.-based agronomy and farm management firm Decisive Farming and Vancouver software developer Farm At Hand, among others, also expanded that roster again Thursday.

The company said Thursday it has closed deals for Florida-based AFS Technologies — “a global leader in sales and distribution solutions to the consumer goods market” — and Agrian, a California company with a “unified management platform for precision, agronomy, sustainability, analytics and compliance.”

It also announced Thursday it has a deal in place, pending certain conditions, to take up another Canadian company, Okotoks, Alta.-based Feedlot Health Management Solutions, billed as “North America’s premier feedlot consulting service.”

“Over the course of the last year, Telus has completed several key acquisitions, assembling a suite of assets that is unmatched in the agriculture industry,” the company said in a release.

“Together under Telus Agriculture, our team now has the expertise, experience, and relationships to connect every participant in the agriculture value chain, from seed manufacturers and farmers through to grocery stores and restaurants.”

Terris characterized the acquisitions to date as a “quilt,” in the sense that the whole is expected to be of greater use than the sum of its parts, better connecting farmers and livestock producers to the food side of the equation.

Outside Canada, the new unit’s acquisitions so far also include:

• TKXS, a North Carolina-based firm offering “specialized software, program management and data solutions deliver(ing) critical information to agribusinesses;”
• U.K. software firm Muddy Boots, whose products link “production and food quality data to create a smoother flow of information to help improve decision making and production;”
• Hummingbird, a U.K. company, offering “advanced imagery analytics;” and
• AGIntegrated, a Pennsylvania company which bills itself as “the integration leader in the precision agriculture industry,” using APIs (application programming interfaces) to simplify data flow between platforms.

In all, Telus Agriculture said, the unit now supports over 100 million acres of farmland and employs over 1,200 people across Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Mexico, China, Brazil, Germany, Slovakia and Armenia. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

The post Telus’ farm and food sector acquisitions take new shape appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

But how a farmer plans his or her business — and associated risks — can help lower that statistic.

The report, titled “Healthy Minds, Healthy Farms: Exploring a Connection between Mental Health and Farm Business Management” sought to improve understanding of how business and lifestyles influence a farmer’s mental health.

“The Canadian farming population is more stressed than the rest of the population within Canada, for sure,” said FMC executive director Heather Watson.

Ontario-based Wilton Consulting Group worked with FMC to conduct the study, which found 62 per cent of Canadian farmers are categorized with mid-stress scores and 14 per cent with high stress.

Watson said the report follows other recent studies calling for improved mental health supports for farmers, including one conducted by a parliamentary committee in 2019.

“We’ve kind of always felt that business management practices must be impacted by mental health, in terms of your ability to make decisions, think rationally, handle stress and have coping mechanisms,” she said, noting that was all more anecdotal. “We hadn’t really looked at it from an analytical point of view.

“Throughout the research, we kind of had two sides of the same coin: how does mental health impact farm business’ management, and how does farm business management practices affect mental health?”

Overall, the report indicated 21 per cent of farmers regularly follow a risk management plan, while close to half – 48 per cent – do not.

There is evidence suggesting that should change, as 88 per cent of farmers who reported using a written business plans say it contributed to their peace of mind.

“When they did do a business plan, it seemed to result in doing other business practices as well,” Watson said, noting those same farmers were the ones more likely to use advisors or do budgeting.

Watson said 88 per cent of those who had written business plans could look to those plans as a “guiding light” during difficult times.

“Having business management practices isn’t going to reduce the stresses out there. Stressors are out there, whether it’s the weather or markets or whatever, but it does impact how you react to those stressors,” she said. “We found farmers who had business plans had more positive coping mechanisms.”

‘Stuck in an office’

Those who do not have a written business plan often cite their success without one as the reason why – and the thought of making a plan can be stressful.

“I’m interested to see if the context we find ourselves in today (with COVID-19) might shift that thinking a little bit, because business isn’t very good for the majority of farmers right now and it’s a completely blindsiding situation,” she said, questioning if business plans that included a worse-case scenario contingency plan may have helped farmers now.

The report found some demographic differences, with women and younger farmers
showing signs of higher stress levels. For young people, the study suggests they are generally less effective at coping with stress and less likely to practice business risk management plans.

Business planning “is not something that farmers like to do, or want to do,” Watson said. “It doesn’t resonate with them, they didn’t get into farming to manage people or be crunching numbers stuck in an office, so how do we bridge that gap?”

To better support farmer mental health, FMC says continued awareness on the importance of it is needed alongside support in improving mental health literacy within agricultural circles.

FMC also says it and the broader agriculture community need to deliver business management advice, focusing on risk management literacy as a means to face uncertainty. It also calls for more advocacy to expand farmer-specific mental health support services.

“We’re hoping that a lot of groups will look at these recommendations and actions and say, ‘we’ll do a project on that,” said Watson.

In all, the report had 24 calls to action that resulted from an extensive survey involving 1,735 farmers, 14 focus groups and 72 one-on-one interviews with farmers and industry representatives.

Watson and FMC are hoping the study can be used as a reference during the next round of policy development for agriculture.

— D.C. Fraser reports for Glacier FarmMedia from Ottawa.

The post Report links business management, mental health of farmers appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Calgary-based Cervus — which operates 21 Deere dealerships in Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia along with 42 other machinery dealerships in Canada, Australia and New Zealand — announced Thursday it plans to have a new dealership open at Nipawin, Sask. by about April 15.

“We are establishing this greenfield location to provide quicker, more convenient access to agriculture equipment, parts and service for our customers in this thriving agricultural region,” the company said in its year-end financial report.

The Nipawin operation is to include parts technicians, three service bays “equipped with manufacturer-trained service technicians” and a mobile technician for in-field and on-farm repairs.

“This new facility will complement the services currently being offered from our store in Melfort, enhancing the customer experience and improving service levels for farming operations in the agricultural areas of Nipawin, Carrot River, Choiceland and Arborfield,” Cervus CEO Angela Lekatsas said in a release. Nipawin is about 90 km northeast of Melfort.

The company on Thursday reported a net loss for the year ending Dec. 31 of $8.618 million on revenues of $1.14 billion, down from net income of $24.777 million on $1.35 billion in revenues in 2018.

Part of the dip in revenue came from a 24 per cent decline in agriculture equipment revenue for the year, the company said, as the Canadian ag industry “faced a number of headwinds.”

Among those, Cervus said, were reduced 2018 farm income, increased input costs, reduced commodity prices and trade disputes, “all compounded by poor growing and harvesting conditions in parts of our geography.”

Farmers thus “chose to postpone new equipment purchases as many own late-model equipment acquired in recent years,” the company said.

That said, Cervus noted its largest increase in product support revenue was in its agriculture segment, as “demand for parts and service continued through the challenging harvest window.”

A difficult harvest in 2018 “also bolstered early season product support revenue in 2019.”

Cervus on Thursday also announced an “exclusive partnership” with Telus’ cloud-based farm management business Farm At Hand.

“This innovative farm management application enables the digitization of farm records to better manage farm activities, sales timing, field profits and equipment utilization, as well as integrating with the data and analytics delivered by John Deere Operations Center,” Cervus said in its year-end release.

Farm at Hand, Cervus noted, also integrates with the data and analytics delivered by John Deere Operations Center.

Cervus, in its release, said it will “bring these solutions to our customers as the exclusive provider of the Farm at Hand platform in our geography.” Further details weren’t available from Cervus on Friday. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

The post Cervus to expand Saskatchewan reach appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.