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CROPS
Meeting season is part of today's agriculture
By Dr. Paul Tracy
As I sat down to write this column, I was in the middle of planning the 2006/07 winter meeting season. Like crop producers, we agronomists have seasonality associated with our professions. As much as I’d like November to be oriented around avian pursuit, in reality, it is the time of year we digest last year’s results, plan next year’s agronomic inputs and attempt to assimilate the massive amount of information available in today’s agriculture.
The meeting season is necessary to recharge our batteries, set programs for next field season and interact with peers. The efficient planning and prioritizing of your winter meeting schedule will produce dividends.
Conversely, inefficient meeting scheduling wastes time, money and effort. I like to break winter meetings down into several categories which include: discovery, program development and professional networking.
As a crop producer, you can also plan the winter meeting schedule to help sort through the information overload present in today’s society. Try to extract at least one concept that will be used in your crop production program from each winter meeting that you attend.
I always plan a few season-long priorities that are focused on specific topics or programs. Recent cases would be soybean aphids, Asian soybean rust and glyphosate-resistance information collected over the past few winter meeting seasons.
For example, several MFA employees spent much of November through February of last year attending soybean rust meetings. We used the information to make MFA-specific recommendations that could be managed through our retail operations. The result was a professional, corporate-wide program that highlighted sound agronomics and ended up saving appreciable input expenditures for our crop producers.
Several other organizations developed soybean rust programs based upon fear or sales/marketing persuasion programs that ended up either applying unnecessary fungicides to soybean fields or creating large unused fungicide inventories. It was personally rewarding for our staff to observe that in 2006, many other organizations followed MFA’s 2005 soybean rust model lead.
Our Agronomy Services group tries to prioritize several issues each winter meeting season. This year, governmental pest/nutrient management planning, herbicide resistance and the agronomics of biofuel production will be priority topics for our group.
Discovery meetings come in many forms. For me, they include activities like the American Society of Agronomy annual meeting or the University of Missouri Crop Managers Conference. They are always oriented toward obtaining the best available unbiased information from trusted, credible resources. I advise producers to attend as many of these “non sales” meetings as possible. They include university field days, industry workshops and meetings like the Crop Managers Conference.
Program development meetings are more operationally structured with single purpose orientation. MFA’s Seed Kickoff meetings, designed to educate agronomy sales staff concerning delivering an agronomically defendable, premium and complete seed program to our growers are prime examples.
Outreach and training constitute two-way meetings where our staff trains employees and crop producers. During these meetings, we try to highlight basic concepts and develop sound agronomic foundations within the community. They traditionally have an “extension/formal education” design. To be successful, these meetings cannot be oriented around passive learning. They need to encourage information exchange between meeting participants.
Many meetings revolve around professional networking. I pick up much information and develop professional contacts at these meetings. Most other meeting categories partially serve this purpose. Meetings like those offered through the Missouri Agricultural Industries Council (MO-AG) are prime examples of the agricultural community exchanging ideas and maintaining personal relationships.
Sales and marketing meetings occur throughout the winter months. Although primarily sales oriented, these meetings are often designed to provide excellent information concerning new products and technologies.
As purchasers of agricultural inputs, most producers must attend several of these annually. I always advise using them as decision making tools.
MFA provides many of these meetings annually through our agronomy sales group or by serving as a conduit between basic product suppliers and the crop producer.
We all try to attend a few personal development meetings annually. Such meetings include computer training, special licensings or certifications and a myriad of other individual need-specific topics.
Of course, meetings only provide a fraction of our information gathering process. Books, magazines, Internet, schools, telephones, etc. all contribute throughout the calendar year. My perspective is that winter meetings are like all other learning platforms. You get out of them what you put into them.
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