Author Archives Terry Betker

I’m sure you will have read something in the past that defines the vision and mission of a business, including farms. At the risk of repetition, I’m going to summarize. A vision describes the future state of the farm. It provides insight to the question of what it is you are working toward. Both vision […] Read more

What are your thoughts about the existence of a commodities supercycle? Whether we’re in one is open for debate. From some of the reading I’ve done, even economists aren’t all of the same opinion about the presence of a supercycle. What we do know is that the grain and oilseed sector has seen tremendous price […] Read more

Discussion centred around transition tends to focus quite a bit on the generation that is exiting. Thinking about that causes me to wonder how we could determine when someone actually started farming in the first place. We could say it was when someone started working on the farm, but that would be before they became […] Read more

Yogi Berra, the famous New York Yankees catcher, is credited with saying, “it’s like déjà vu all over again.” He had dozens and dozens of sayings that were funny but provided some meaningful life lessons at the same time. So, I’d like to pose a question: are farmers currently in a déjà vu-all-over-again scenario? Let’s […] Read more

There is an abundance of information and resources pertaining to a farm’s business vision, but there’s not so much written about a vision for management. In other words, resources to help a farm family determine what they are managing toward. I’m talking about management structure — who manages what, who does what. An organizational chart […] Read more

Here is a rhetorical but really important question. How do we take the wisdom and experience from the retiring generation and pass it on successfully to the younger, or incoming, generation? This wisdom and experience comes from life’s lessons. There’s a saying that you can’t teach experience but that you can teach from experience. Makes […] Read more

By the time you read this article, 2020 will be in the rear-view mirror. There will be lots written about 2020, most notably the pandemic and including how things have changed and how things will continue to change as a result. This will be a global discussion. Let’s drill the discussion down to the farm […] Read more

So, here’s an interesting question. Would you buy your farm? I don’t mean “would you buy the land?” but rather, a scenario where you didn’t have a farm and were looking to make an investment and one of the investments you were looking at was purchasing a farm. Would you buy your farm, if you […] Read more