Canadian hog farmers and Canada’s pork industry are world export champions, selling most of what they produce to foreign buyers. That’s something to be proud about. Canadian farmers are selling top-quality product to picky foreign buyers who have the choice to buy pork from anywhere, but often find Canada’s to be the best combination of […] Read more
Tag Archives Hedge Row — page 6
Purchasing farmland is always a high-risk gamble
In risk management, everything you do should be based on reasonable expectations. Even if you’re the gambling type, you should only be making gambles in which you know the odds you’re playing with. That applies to short-term situations, like the kinds of prices your crops or livestock will likely fetch a few months from now. […] Read more
Worries abound as markets wallow in distressing times
The world has a lot to worry about. That has been demonstrated in a way that those of us who follow markets closely can see most clearly: in the prices of commodities and stocks. The S&P 500 index is still well underneath levels it first surpassed in late 2017 and is still near correction territory […] Read more
Cash advances often not worth the hassle for farmers
When is free money not worth it? When it’s too much hassle in a business where time is money. That’s the message I’m getting from a number of farmers I’ve talked with about why they don’t use cash advances, which seem like free money, in a theoretical sense. In reality, the financial gain just doesn’t […] Read more
Oil trouble shows risk of grain bottlenecks
You’re probably used to grain transportation constrictions costing you money and messing up your marketing plan. Don’t be too comfortable with that uncomfortable reality. It could get worse — a bunch worse. If you think 2013-14 or 1996-97 were bad, be thankful they were mostly one-year phenomena. Look over your fence line, or at the […] Read more
U.S. trade mess is Canada’s chance to gain advantage
So, what now? With the U.S. midterm elections done, we have more certainty about who has the power and influence in Washington for the next two years. Unfortunately, that doesn’t provide a lot of certainty for trade. Will the U.S. approve NAFTA2? Will the U.S. attempt to get back into the new Trans-Pacific Partnership? Most […] Read more
2008 crisis showed importance of interest rates
Editor’s note: This is the fifth of a series of columns looking at the lessons learned from the financial crisis of 2008. Basic assumptions failed. Reasonable expectations were vexed. Predicting the future became perilous for any prognosticator. However, Phil Shaw found an old lesson verified in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008-09: interest […] Read more
Canada’s supply managed sectors must now avoid stagnation
Ed White’s series on lessons learned from the financial crisis of 10 years ago will resume next week. Now is the time to face up to the bad math that threatens to throttle the future of the Canadian dairy industry. In the aftermath of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, there is a lot of talk of […] Read more
Manage farms like low-margin, high-volume businesses
Editor’s note: This is the fourth of a series of columns looking at the lessons learned from the financial crisis of 2008. There’s no sure-fire way for a farm protect itself against crash risk. The 2008-09 financial crisis proved that, and it sent a shockwave through the farming and agriculture industries, causing immense damage and […] Read more
Remembering the lessons from the 2008 financial crisis
Editor’s note: This is the first of a series of columns looking at the lessons learned from the financial crisis of 2008. Do you remember where you were 10 years ago when we fell into a worldwide financial crisis? (It still doesn’t have a generally accepted name, with the Great Contraction, the Financial Crisis and […] Read more
