Kenneth Brown
of The Crossroads
The growing season is not far away, though recent frigid temperatures might make it seem that way, and the region’s agriculture outlook meeting is ready to go.
Each year a large group of sponsors organizes and hosts the West Central Ag Outlook meeting. This year’s Ag Outlook meeting takes place on March 14 at the Elks Hall in Kindersley. The doors open at 9 a.m., and the first speaker is scheduled to start at 9:30 a.m.
The Ag Outlook meeting is free and open to all producers. The event features four expert speakers, exhibitors and a free lunch. Producers also have the chance to win the door prize of $500 in Ag Outlook Bucks, and they could spend the money at any one of the event’s sponsoring businesses.
As for speakers, the popular Drew Lerner will be back to provide a weather forecast for the 2018 growing season and John Ippolito, a crop specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture, will talk about insects, diseases and weeds.
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Jonathon Driedger of FarmLink, a market analyst based in Winnipeg, is back for the second consecutive year to present a market outlook to producers. David Yee, the fourth speaker, is a new addition to the Ag Outlook meeting and he will be presenting about how precision technology could become more involved with the farm of the future.
The Ag Outlook’s organizing committee includes representatives from the sponsoring businesses. Ippolito, who sits on the committee for Saskatchewan Agriculture, said planning the event has always gone “reasonably well” for the committee.
Organizers meet to identify the topics and speakers they want to have at the meeting and he said three of the topics have become standard over the years. The three standard topics are the market outlook, weather forecast and the presentation on insects and plant diseases.
He noted that the speakers, themselves, for the three main topics might change from year to year, but the topics “are pretty much standard every year.” The committee changes up one of the topics each year depending on what is going on in the industry.
The idea of precision technology on the farm is unique to the 2018 event and Ippolito said the presentation will cover a wide range of topics. He said precision agriculture used to be considered the ability to apply seed and fertilizer at a variable rate across a field, but times are changing in the industry.
“All the technology has now evolved, so data collection and using that data for management decisions is now part of what we’re seeing,” Ippolito said, recognizing the use of technology on the farm is evolving in several ways.
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, are now being used on farms, along with satellite imagery, he said. The use of satellite imagery was used to prepare early variable rate fertilizer maps, but satellite technology has improved through the years, the organizer said.
He noted that there are more weather stations on farms today than there were in the past, but he is not sure if it will be one of the topics Yee covers in his presentation. The weather stations on farms are nothing new, but Ippolito said farmers have been starting to use the information in different ways in recent years.
The information from weather stations is now being used to forecast diseases or to record frost events. Ippolito said he believes Yee is going to cover a gamut of technologies and how they could be used on the farm.
As for his presentation, the crop specialist said he will be talking about an insect that became a problem in 2017 and whether or not the pest will make a return in 2018. He will talk about insect forecasts and while 2017 was not a bad year for diseases, they are still out there, the expert said.
Ippolito said Lerner, a regular speaker at the event, is a good draw because prairie farmers are familiar with him and his forecasting. There are other agriculture outlook meetings in areas, but the meeting in Kindersley is unique because it is free thanks to sponsors, he added.
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