The Secret To This Farmer’s Success

Lucky for me, this column happens to coincide with the Outstanding Young Farmer edition of Grainews.Andrew DeRuyck, my business partner, and his wife Tanis were recently named Manitoba s Outstanding Young Farmers. I felt it was my duty as a responsible member of the media that someone shed some light on the full story of […] Read more

How Farmer Selling Impacts Lentil Prices

Now that the lentil crop is more or less in the bin, where are we at with supplies? My estimate was around 800,000 metric tonnes (MT) or so of production while other analysts were reporting more or less twice as much. I have great respect for the difficulty in assessing the size of the crop […] Read more


A Look Back: Stocks One Year Ago

I believe that most stocks are going to trade sideways for years to come. I suspect the U.S. administration studied the mood of the American public and hopes that if it can keep the value of their investments up, that Americans will keep spending money. A few years ago Americans were quite busy spending money […] Read more

Best Returns May Be In The Back Yard

The bond market has come to a fundamental divide. Canadian and American short term bonds pay so little and, in turn, money market funds and bank accounts too little, that off-farm fixed income investing has to be rethought. After all, getting a pittance on your cash is hardly a way to make a living. We […] Read more


Diary Of A Surprising Canola Crop

City slickers will never understand what it means to play poker with Mother Nature and be lucky enough the win the odd hand. That s the story of 2011 for this canola crop. As always, the full story of a crop really begins with the crop that is harvested the year previously. 2010 October 1:Combined […] Read more



Three Tips For Buying Winter Feed

When we started farming, buying hay was what hobby people did. Real farmers, producers that make their living on the farm, had enough land to pasture and winter feed their livestock. The droughts and floods of the last five years along with an upsurge of sustenance farmers (people that farm to feed themselves) have changed […] Read more

The Case Of The Disappearing N

Certain aspects of achieving crop yield goals are like building a foundation on a new house. Soil testing and soil test nitrogen (N) levels are two major yield goal foundation components. Without this information, it is very difficult to consistently hit desired yield goals. This analogy reminds of my first paid job in ag (off […] Read more


Understanding And Acting On Tops And Bottoms

The stock market offers us many ways to make money. The most common one is buy and hold, although many would like to buy low and sell high. Many investors feel the buy and hold strategy doesn’t work anymore but few know how to buy low and sell high. To do that, we likely need […] Read more

Old Enough To Be Good

I was at an Agriculture Canada retirement recently and enjoyed visiting with many I had not seen for a while. During lunch the discussion included the need for old fossils to make sure valuable information was in a place where future generations could use it, i.e. a place where it will pop up when Google […] Read more