Recorded at the end of 2020, this panel brings four producers from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Montana together with Heather Watson of Farm Management Canada to work through what went right, what went wrong and what each of them is changing. Watson opens with research showing only one in five Canadian farms has a written business plan, and that planning correlates with both financial performance and peace of mind. The producers are candid about a drought, a twenty inch rainfall, a fertility strategy pushed too far, and a soybean crop written off. The through line is that the operators who improve are the ones who sit down in winter and decide what to change rather than waiting to see what the year does.
Twenty one percent of Canadian farms have a written business plan. Of the ones that do not, forty percent say they do not need one because they are doing fine without it.
Heather Watson, executive director of Farm Management Canada, brings that research to a table of four producers who have just finished one of the strangest years any of them can remember. Kent Erickson farms east central Alberta. Marcel Van Staveren farms twenty two thousand acres in southeast Saskatchewan with his brothers. Ron farms in western Manitoba. Franck moved his family from Saskatchewan to Montana and crossed the border the day it closed.
Between them they had a drought, a flood, a border closure and a rally that saved the year. What they do with that is the episode.
What's Inside
- The research linking a written plan to financial performance and to peace of mind, and why so many operators say they do not need one
- What each of the four would not do again, including a fertility strategy that swung too far toward soil health and cost yield
- The Manitoba field that took twenty inches of rain in five days, and how hard it was to walk away from it
- What twenty to thirty dollars an acre of input savings actually came from in a year when prices moved
- Why one of them buys iron that is five to twelve years old, and what he found out about that the day before this was recorded
- The standard operating procedures one of them wrote so the farm keeps running if something happens to him
Kent Erickson
A farmer in Irma Alberta with a 4,000- acre green family farm and a former political lobbyist in Canadian agriculture issues.
https://twitter.com/tek2541?lang=en
https://weeklyreview.ca/erickson-family-of-irma-win-2016-farm-family-award/
Ron Krahn
A farmer from Rivers Manitoba, a province on the Northwest of Brandon. Ron farms at Rivers, MB with his brother and their families. He grows wheat, canola, yellow peas, sunflowers, soybeans and is learning how to grow corn.
Franck Groeneweg
Originally from Regina, Saskatchewan, Franck owns a farm in Three Forks, Montana. Proud farmer, father of four and a husband, he is proud to be a steward of the land, feeding the world with the best technology available so the food that farmers produce, and that my family eats, can be nutritious, abundant, affordable, and sustainable.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/franck-groeneweg-a9657717/?originalSubdomain=ca
Marcel Van Staveren
Born and raised in Saskatchewan, 2nd generation of Dutch immigrants-1960. Owns a 23,000 -acres farm with his two brothers, two sons, and nephews.
https://twitter.com/marcelvanst?lang=en
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