CropSphere has announced the keynote speakers for its inaugural two-day conference running Jan. 14-15 in Saskatoon.
The joint presentation by Saskatchewan Pulse Growers, the Saskatchewan Canola Development Commission, the Saskatchewan Flax Development Commission and the Saskatchewan Oat Development Commission is a major new event at Crop Production Week.
Instead of holding four separate conferences at the Saskatoon Inn, the four grower groups are working together to put on a joint conference downtown at TCU Place.
Registration for CropSphere 2014 will be $150 per person. Growers will be able to register online starting Oct. 1 at the event’s newly minted website www.cropsphere.com, which goes online June 21.
Read Also
New Quebec ag minister named in shuffle
Farmers in Quebec get a new representative at the provincial cabinet table as Premier Francois Legault names Donald Martel the new minister of agriculture, replacing Andre Lamontagne.
Confirmed keynote speakers include Bruce Croxon, a judge on CBC’s Dragon’s Den, Glen Hodgson, chief economist for the Conference Board of Canada, and Michele Payn-Knoper, author of No More Food Fights!
Catherine Folkersen, executive director of SaskCanola, said a joint conference creates efficiencies such as sharing the cost of keynote speakers and freeing up staff to mingle with farmers.
“We were all spending too much time on our (individual) days,” she said.
“We didn’t really get out to meet with farmers at other days, and when you have this number of farmers in the city, the best thing for us to do is to be out at the show interacting with them.”
Folkersen said CropSphere better reflects the integrated nature of modern farming operations.
However, smaller commodity groups will continue to hold their annual meetings and associated conferences at the Saskatoon Inn.
Some were concerned they wouldn’t be able to make quorum with the distractions of a joint meeting and concurrent sessions, said Kevin Hursh, who co-ordinates Crop Production Week with his wife, Marlene.
“For groups like mustard and canaryseed and seed growers, that’s their main event of the year,” he said.
“They don’t really want concurrent sessions. They want something more concentrated.”
Nearly half of the attendees at the mustard conference are industry representatives such as employees of French’s mustard.
“An event like they’re having at CropSphere wouldn’t be of any interest to them. They want to be there for a full day of mustard information,” said Hursh.
Logistics could be an issue in 2014 with farmers shuttling back and forth between the two venues in addition to the Crop Production Show at Prairieland Park.
“People are pulled a number of different directions, there’s no doubt about that,” said Hursh.
However, he is happy that all the commodity groups are still under the Crop Production Week umbrella and are paying their $250 membership fee to the organization.
“It’s useful to present it all as part of Crop Production Week and have all of the schedules published in one place and try to co-ordinate as much as possible on timing rather than making it look like competing venues,” he said.
To that end, nothing will happen at the Saskatoon Inn Jan. 14-15 at the Saskatoon Inn other than the Saskatchewan Seed Growers Association conference. The special session has been moved from the evening of Jan. 15 to the evening of Jan. 16.
“We know a lot of producers will want to be at both locations, so we’ve tried to structure around that,” said Hursh.
Folkersen said they hope to attract 800 to 1,000 farmers to the inaugural CropSphere event. Hursh expects a similar number will attend the conferences still taking place at the Saskatoon Inn.
He suspects the newly formed Saskatchewan wheat and barley commissions will end up joining the pulse, canola, flax and oat groups at TCU Place.
