Everybody likes talking about the weather, as the saying goes, but apparently not enough wanted to talk about it at the Canadian Wheat Board’s Weather Summit.
The board announced last week it was cancelling the conference, scheduled to be held in Saskatoon Dec. 2-3.
“We just weren’t getting a sufficient level of registration,” said board spokesperson Maureen Fitzhenry.
“We needed to have at least 100 registrants and we were so far off that mark we felt we just had to pull the plug.”
Read Also
Carberry field day looks for agriculture solutions
Manitoba farmers explored research solutions for resilient crops, perpetual agronomic issues and new kinds of agricultural products at a field day at the Manitoba Crop Diversification Centre in Carberry on Aug. 6.
She said it’s unfortunate because the conference was going to bring together for the first time high profile weather industry organizations to talk about how to share information and technology to create a “network of weather networks.”
The board was also going to use the conference to officially launch WeatherFarm, a new version of its WeatherBug program. That program will provide online tools to enable producers and others to make use of up-to-the minute weather information.
The launch will now take place at a CWB media event in Winnipeg Dec. 2.
Environment Canada was going to present a strategic look ahead at its future role and John Snow, an expert on weather networks from the University of Oklahoma, was slated to be a keynote speaker.
Fitzhenry said there seemed to be a lot of interest from people in the industry but that didn’t translate into registrations, probably for a number of reasons:
It’s always a challenge to sell a first-time conference without the track record of an annual event.
Other conferences were scheduled at the same time that competed for the same registrants.
Transportation into Saskatoon was proving problematic for potential attendees.
In CWB-WeatherBug, the board has created the largest weather network in Western Canada, based on hundreds of farm-based weather stations.
The board hoped to use the conference to brainstorm about the future with officials other weather networks, including provincial government networks in Alberta and Saskatchewan and Environment Canada.
