Recent highlights for Tom Manley include receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Organic Council of Ontario and touring a Walmart warehouse. The award was a bit embarrassing, he says, but the Walmart tour was excellent. “It was a great opportunity to observe things and ask a lot of questions,” says Manley, founder and president […] Read more
Stories by Glenn Cheater
Premium markets require extra attention to quality
If you want to know why Terry Curley spent hundreds of thousands last year to replace a perfectly good potato grading line, look inside a bag of potato chips. Is there a tiny spot that’s just a little bit too brown ? That won’t do. A thin line of chlorophyll green along the edge? Uh […] Read more
Business owners grow with the flow
Entrepreneurs are a special breed, right, risk takers who thrive on never knowing what’s coming next and who would be bored by a regular life? Sure, some are like that. But most are more like Judy Kolk. “We’ve being doing this for 14 years and for the first five or six years, I probably would […] Read more
Do your people have room to grow and expand their skills?
Our people are our greatest asset is a nice saying but imagine if they were your only asset? That was basically the situation Brad Johnson and Tamara Ensio Johnson faced when they started Mont Echo Naturels in 2007. “In our business, we have to do everything from farming to processing, from packaging to marketing and […] Read more
Uncharted waters hold no fear for Nova Scotia farmers
David Ernst is an accidental farmer, someone whose hobby got out of control. “When I started planting cranberries, I thought this would be a part-time job and I’d go down once a year to reap them,” says the 42-year-old Nova Scotian. “Well, I soon learned they don’t grow by themselves and they certainly don’t process […] Read more
Being the boss doesn’t mean being a know-it-all
What’s your most valuable business skill: your smarts, your take-charge attitude, your sales ability? Those are all fine attributes, but they’re also potential handicaps. Patrick Guilbert scores high in all of the above, but says they’re not the secret to his success. “I don’t ever want to come across as someone who knows everything,” Guilbert […] Read more
Trust instincts when considering business deal
It’s tough to be a lone wolf these days, given the costs and complexity of modern agriculture, which is why more farmers are partnering. But how do farmers go about finding the right partner? Consider the example of Pat Beaujot. On a January morning in 2006, the co-founder of air seeder maker Seed Hawk met […] Read more
Successful businesses cater to customer by listening to needs
The customer is king. This golden rule of business sounds sensible enough until you start dealing with customers. For example, what do you do when a customer says he wants a better product from you – and what he wants may not even be possible? Fred de Martines, a producer of Tamworth and Berkshire pork, […] Read more
Striving for quality key to success
The most surprising thing about Wayd McNally’s company isn’t that it’s successful. It’s that it’s not more successful. The Prince Edward Island entrepreneur founded Sensor Wireless in 2002. He has customers in more than 40 countries from Fortune 500 companies such as Coca-Cola and Nestlé to potato farmers cropping a few hundred acres. Sales are […] Read more
Flour consumer able to put face to wheat grower
You hear those stories from Japan about shoppers scanning a bar code to find out what farm their produce was grown on and think, “how odd.” It may be hard to imagine something like that in North America, but it is happening here and in a food category you might not expect: wheat flour. Stone-Buhr […] Read more
