The journey of turning family farming into a successful farming business, and all the stories and struggles in between.
A frost in the third week of August took almost everything off a farm that had just stretched to buy ten quarters of land. Everybody in the district got hit. It very nearly ended the operation.
This is part two of a conversation with the patriarch of a Saskatchewan grain farm, tracing what happened after the next generation came home full time. It covers the growth from fifteen hundred acres to five figures, and the two stretches where the whole thing looked like it might not hold.
What's Inside
- Why a man with a good off-farm job could not see how he would ever farm full time, and what he thinks that job was quietly costing him
- The land purchase that felt like too much risk at the time, and looks obvious now
- What happens when the bank tells you that you need a debt restructuring and you do not know what a financial statement is
- The first business plan anyone ever built for the farm, and how a forced process turned into a permanent one
- Back-to-back years of the worst losses the operation had seen, and a strategy session where the banker decided whether it continued
- The shift from doing everything yourself to asking who could do it better, and how that felt to a man who had always done it himself
- Why equipment used to be how a farm signalled success, and why that is changing
- What the patriarch actually does on the farm now, in his own words
Listen to part I to learn about Harvey's story about the beginnings of the family farm.
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