As a farmer in Southern Alberta, you have a constant challenge on your hands to keep ahead on your profit margins. Not only do you have high taxes and high expenses to deal with, but you also have a high amount of risk associated with your business. Your profits rely heavily on influences that are well beyond your control—influences like weather: drought, flooding, and late frosts can do a significant amount of damage to your yield, and one incident can cause damages that can’t be easily recovered throughout the year. While, unfortunately, you still don’t have many options when it comes to mitigating those out-of-your-control risks, there are a couple of ways you can mitigate costs to stabilize your profit margins and build a higher safety net for those years when things do get out of control. One way is to take advantage of government incentives, and the other is to stick to low-cost energy providers for your energy consumption needs right from the get-go.
How can lower energy rates help prepare you for those unexpected costs?
It seems silly, right? How could saving two cents a kW on energy from a low-cost energy provider help protect you from the damages that could be incurred by the next tornado that tears up your fields and injures or kills your livestock? Southern Alberta, after all, is considered to be in a “Tornado Alley,” hosting, on average, 15 of the typical 43 tornadoes per that hit Canada’s prairies. Well, consider it this way: if you took all the money you save on your energy bill and let it accumulate, you could potentially accumulate enough to help with your insurance deductible so that, when disaster does strike, you aren’t really losing any profits that you wouldn’t have already spent.
And that isn’t the only application for the savings a low-cost energy provider can provide. Any money that doesn’t have to be taken up by the base costs of running your operation can be reinvested back into your business to provide advancements. These could take the form of technology upgrades that could make your farm more efficient and thus more profitable, allowing for a larger profit margin to cover you in the event that any losses do take place.
Alternatively, you could use your cost savings to diversify your farm by investing in opportunities like wind energy. Wind turbines can be installed on most farmland without taking much space away from normal farm applications—you can plant and harvest your field around a wind turbine without issue—and if you’re in an area that is prone to tornado-grade winds, then chances are you could stand to make a bit of extra cash in wind energy production (in addition to the cost benefits of current government incentives for investing in green energy).
When it comes to using the savings enabled by low-cost energy providers to benefit the bottom line of your Southern Alberta farm, countless possibilities await. Start comparing energy costs among providers to determine the savings you could be accessing through lower rates and more efficient plans that are specialized to the needs Southern Alberta farms. Visit us at energyrates.ca to learn more.
