Want a method of setting strategic priorities for the short–, medium- and long-term future of your farm? The way Merle Good sees it, it’s not getting any easier to make a buck farming. In fact, given a robust Canadian dollar, rising input costs and global trade issues, he believes it’s getting quite a bit harder.

There’s not much an individual producer can do to shape the big economic issues of the day. Still, Good insists that producers have a wealth of opportunities to seize greater control. It starts by exploring two questions: where am I now and where am I going?

Good advises producers to divide their planning challenge into three pieces, and address each in terms of financial, marketing and human resource issues. In this article, Good highlights what producers should do within the next two years, the following three to five years, and the five to 10 years after that.

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