There’s a new farm conference in town this winter.
“We’re reimagining it as a new show,” said Todd Hames, chair of the FarmTech Foundation of Alberta.
The foundation has switched gears and is putting on a revamped event, called CrossRoads, at the Edmonton Convention Centre on Jan. 24-25.
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“We wanted to create a new feel and an atmosphere of networking, and farmers having the chance to share their ideas,” said Hames, a grain farmer from Marwayne. “That’s where CrossRoads came in — an intersection of people and ideas.”
FarmTech was last held in January 2020, and during the pandemic hiatus, Hames said organizers asked themselves how they would change the show if circumstances permitted.
FarmTech started in Red Deer before moving to Edmonton (initially at the Mayfield Inn and then the Expo Centre) with the look and feel changing significantly as the event became bigger, Hames said.
“We’re fitting into a different world than we have been in,” he said. “It’s not just COVID-19, the world was changing before that. That’s the kind of re-visioning. If we just kept the same name, people would come and say, ‘That’s not FarmTech.’”
Attendance will be greatly reduced, with daily ticket sales capped to around 700 farmers and industry members, instead of 1,800.
There will also be a reduced focus on agronomy, since the four groups behind the conference (the wheat, barley, canola and pulse commissions) also put on Agronomy Update. Instead the goal is to bring farmers together to discuss topics such as sustainability, policies, marketing, farm management and “big picture” issues, said Hames.
Another major change is absence of a trade show.
“When FarmTech got so large, people lost some of the networking ability and the ability to have discussions because it was so spread out,” he said. “The trade show was very popular for some people, but then there was some difficulty in the scheduling for sponsors because the speakers would be on, and there would be no farmers in the trade show.”
Although the inaugural edition will be in Edmonton, the slimmed down conference is no longer anchored to the city, said Hames.
“We’re not nailed down to being in that location all the time,” he said. “With a new event, things could change in a different year.”
Because there won’t be a trade show (although there will be sponsor booths), the schedule will no longer have open slots that gave attendees time to see displays. Instead, there will be more than 15 concurrent sessions and three keynote speakers.
“Hopefully, we’re in a closer environment where more discussions can take place,” said Hames.
“We want to build a successful show. As people come to the show and we talk to farmers, there could be more demand — maybe people want it larger or smaller.”
The end-of-day banquets have also been scrapped. Many companies held their own events during FarmTech, so organizers have decided to leave the evenings open for companies or farmers to plan their own activities, said Hames.
Members of the foundation (a non-profit that still exists under the FarmTech name) noted that many ag events in other provinces have undergone significant changes in recent years, Hames said, adding one of the key goals is to generate excitement about what the show can be.
“We’re seeing that a lot of information transfer has changed, so we’re deciding, ‘what do we want to be, and what is our best fit?’”
Registration for CrossRoads will open in the early fall. A new website, crossroadscropconference.ca, is being developed and will have the conference agenda, speaker list and ticket info.
