Agriculture committee  We have annual reviews with all of our farmers. One of the topics on the agenda is always farm succession. We try to introduce it at an early time, talking about thinking about the plans. I mentioned life insurance earlier as one of the tools that some farmers use in order to fin

Agriculture committee  On my flight from London today, I sat beside a young man who runs a computer business. We got talking about what we both do. I mentioned I was coming here today. One of the issues we were talking about was succession planning. It turns out this fellow is from Montreal but his wif

Agriculture committee  We try to take everything into account, so the income that can be earned by doing the niche farm operation and their off-farm income to see if, between everything, we can make a go of it. We look at all the different avenues possible to try to help someone get into farming, but i

Agriculture committee  I've seen both sides of the coin. When our dollar is very high and the commodities that we sell become expensive, it's been very hard on a number of farm-related operations and just plain primary producers as well. When our dollar goes down, obviously many farmers benefit from th

Agriculture committee  I have no idea. It's like predicting interest rates. We've talked about interest rates going up for the last five years, and that hasn't happened, so I'm not going to make predictions on those.

Agriculture committee  There's been a tremendous increase in the number of farm loans that have been written over the last 10 years. Part of it is an increase in the value of assets. I would be remiss to say that 10 years ago a lot of our competitors in the banks weren't interested in agriculture, but

Agriculture committee  No. I know that it's a big challenge in our area. I was trying to think of an example. Mr. Shipley, my MP, knows the area that I come from. It's the town of Parkhill and Ailsa Craig. I grew up on a farm there and it's about a 10-mile stretch between the two towns. When I grew up

Agriculture committee  Thanks, Rob. As mentioned, I'm the vice-president of agricultural and commercial services at Libro Credit Union. We're based in southwestern Ontario, serving our owners west of the GTA to Essex County and from Lake Huron to Lake Erie. Libro has the largest credit union agricult