Work Smarter with CAAR.

It’s very quiet in the CAAR office every spring. The phones aren’t ringing and email is minimal because CAAR members are out in the field, busy from sun up to set (and in many cases long into the night) supporting farmers as they get their fields ready and crops planted. You can almost hear the collective sigh of relief as spring comes to a close and summer allows for rest and relaxation… Except that doesn’t really happen, does it?

While our readers will hopefully find the time to enjoy some of the fun summer has to offer, we know that these next few months are spent planning and running crop tours, facilitating ongoing customer service needs and of course prepping for harvest. It’s hardly a downtime. It is, however, a time to consider what went well, what could have gone better and how to best manage your business moving forward. It’s a time to consider establishing efficiencies to help ensure that your dedicated staff is working smarter, not harder.

This issue of The Communicator is dedicated to exactly that. We’re highlighting the best business practices you need to consider in managing your agri-retail location. We start with an exploration of corporate culture – how to define it, manage it and make it work for you – so that you can leverage it to grow your business. We’re also talking staff recruitment, retention and how that impacts your bottom line. From there we dive into the issues facing your business and how to best manage them: maximum residue limits, fertilizer flow in the yard and making use of new technologies to help manage your business better.

I invite you to learn more about CAAR’s partnership with the Canadian Association of Farm Advisors (CAFA), which we have featured in our Growing Together department. CAAR is excited to expand our network to include CAFA’s experts as a resource for agri-retailers.

And finally, check out CAAR News on page 6 for information about a brand new CAAR Perk$ program. Humaniqa offers customized HR services and templates to help businesses of any size manage HR issues effectively. Just one of the many programs offered by CAAR to help agri-retailers work smarter.

Best wishes,

Lynda Nicol
Editor-in-chief

Related Articles

  • Forward Thinking With many agriculture events and meetings being cancelled this spring with the growing spread of the COVID-19 virus, CAAR was lucky enough to have had the 2020 CAAR Conference wrapped up before much of the world put ...
  • Nurture Minds for New Solutions Of all the stories we get to tell in this magazine, some of my favourites are those that appear in our sustainability department. These articles tend to deal with topics that take place at the intersection of advance...
  • The Constancy of Change In April of 1997 a young writer, fresh out of college, started on the first phase of his career at a publisher working on ag magazines. That writer was me, and the first magazine I was assigned to work on was The Com...
  • Innovation, Evolution and Change If there was one thing that stood out during the creation of this magazine, it was that significant changes are currently underway across agriculture and ag retail. Both feature stories in this issue have themes of i...
  • Invaluable Conversations Every year, I come away from the CAAR Conference with my head spinning. It takes a bit of time to process all of the information, all of the implications and simply take a breath after the fast pace of the event. ...

Join the discussion...

You must be logged in as a CAAR member to comment.