Noel McNaughton

I talked to a farmer from Alberta a while back who has several children but none wants to take over the farm. He is in his early 70s and doesn’t want to keep farming, but can’t face the idea of the farm not having his family’s name on it, especially because it will become a […] Read more

You know the old story: the pessimist sees the glass half empty and the optimist sees it half full. (The engineer sees a glass that is made twice as big as it needs to be.) Now here is the thing: the pessimist and the optimist are seeing the glass from different parts of their brains. […] Read more

All farming really consists of is catching sunshine and putting it in the bank. The solar chain is a key concept taught in holistic management, a decision-making framework I have used and taught to hundreds of farm families during the past 15 years. It can make a big difference on your bottom line. The solar […] Read more

One summer when I was in my teens, a neighbour needed help putting up hay. He still farmed with horses and I got to drive the team and run the dump rake. We had farmed with horses when I was younger, but weren’t any more, so haying with my neighbour was like dying and going […] Read more

Here’s a novel approach when thinking about farm transfer. When we consider estate planning, we usually think only about visiting a lawyer and writing a will. Bruce Beswick, a farmer and financial planner in eastern Ontario, says an estate plan is much more than that and it always requires a team. He says his job […] Read more

By the time we reach midlife, most of us have been married for quite a while. Even if we’ve been divorced, we’ve still been married for quite a while, just not to the same person. Marriage can be incredibly fulfilling, sort of ho-hum or a downright ordeal, depending on how we treat each other. The […] Read more

A few days ago I got a call from a farmer who is angry and upset because of how tough it is to make a living in agriculture. He believes it should be different. Society should pay farmers a decent price for their products. I certainly agree that conventional agriculture is a tough way to […] Read more

One time when I was a news reporter, I was sent to the Peace River country in northern Alberta to do stories on the harvest. It was late October, it had rained a great deal and much of the harvest had not been taken off. I figured the stress of the situation would show up […] Read more

In spite of the old adage that “money can’t bring you happiness,” everybody I know is pretty sure having more money would make them happier. So what do you do when you don’t have more money and don’t see your ship coming in any time soon? Well, a couple of economists in the United States […] Read more

Back when I was with CBC, I interviewed a couple who had lost their farm in northern Alberta. When they realized it was over and they couldn’t hang on any longer, they loaded their two kids and a few possessions into their half-ton truck and snuck away in the middle of the night, full of […] Read more