The meeting must go on

Reporter's Notebook

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Published: April 8, 2014

Rural folk are pretty resourceful — but never more so than when they want to get out of a meeting on time.

When a first-day-of-spring snowfall in Red Deer downed power lines across the city, cutting power at a DuPont corn planter clinic, agronomist Doug Moisey sprang into action.

“We’ll go get a generator,” he announced. “There’s a Canadian Tire down the block.”

This reporter thought he must be joking. Surely, the meeting would have to wait until the power was back on.

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Moisey, however, told everyone they would have to sit tight for 20 minutes.

True to his word, Moisey set up a generator in the lobby and strung enough extension cord to run the projector. With only a few hiccups, presenter Bill Lehmkuhl of Precision Ag Services was able to continue his talk about corn planters, with only the glow from his PowerPoint to illuminate the room until the power came back on almost an hour after it had gone out.

That allowed Moisey to keep his other promise: That everyone would be back on the road by 3 o’clock.

About the author

Jennifer Blair

Reporter

Jennifer Blair is a Red Deer-based reporter with a post-secondary education in professional writing and nearly 10 years of experience in corporate communications, policy development, and journalism. She's spent half of her career telling stories about an industry she loves for an audience she admires--the farmers who work every day to build a better agriculture industry in Alberta.

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