CropLife Retail Week: Special 2024 Tech Hub LIVE Wrap-Up

Eric Sfiligoj and Lara Sowinski present highlights from this week’s key ag technology event in Des Moines, IA.

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*Below is a partial and edited transcript:

Eric Sfiligoj: Hello. Welcome to another edition of CropLife Retail Week. I’m Eric Sfiligoj, Editor, CropLife here again with Lara Sowinski. Lara, how are you doing?

Lara Sowinski: I’m fried. But good is that’s the honest answer. I was going to say that pretty much describes most of our crew. I’m sure on this day, we’ve now all returned home from our annual Tech Hub Live event in Des Moines, which took place, actually starting on Monday, the 29th of July and went through the 31st.

ES: But a lot of us were, we stuck around for the whole event. And, we’re coming home on Thursday, August 1st, which was an adventure for some of us. But we will leave that for another discussion. but the event itself, my takeaways. Lara, it was, I think, a very good, good, well attended event. I know I think we had, 6 or 700 attendees.

So walking around for the two day event, three, if you count the women and ag tech stuff, which we will get to in a moment. but, you know, there was a lot of new technology discussed and things shown on the exhibit floor that seemed to have attendees excited and a lot of great information shared in the general and educational sessions that were held.

So, yeah, my takeaways were that, everyone came away from the event with something that they could take back to their folks in their offices and that their companies that, will hopefully help them, you know, increase ROI or yields or whatever they’re looking goal wise to accomplish in the upcoming year. How about how about your general takeaways from Tech Hub Live?

LS:  Yeah, no. Thank you. I think final numbers were, you know, close to 700, 700, which I think is higher than lot last year. I think we were in the same neighborhood. You know, I honestly, you know, now that I’ve had a little bit of a, a distance from it, you know, looking back this past week, I really, really, really feel very good about the program.

Just, you know, being in the the lunch line and hearing comments from folks. And so on and so forth, it it seems really, really like, honestly, a good program from start to finish. as you mentioned, why it kicking off on Monday, we had, gosh, again, kind of really similar numbers we launched. If those of you recall, we launched Women in Ag Tech last year during Tech Hub Live, and this was our third in-person meeting.

Wendy Snric from Corteva was our keynote speaker. we had two feature presentations, one from Jacqueline Claypool at John Deere. Joyce Hunter from Mission Critical and one of our ambassadors spoke on rulemaking. And then we had a panel devoted to that. It was it was great.

Honestly, a lot of good feedback. Feedback. And it’s nice to see familiar faces, women who’ve returned and, are participated. And likewise, a lot of new folks as well. So really do appreciate that. and I do honestly want to, say thank you. Women in tech, our signature sponsor this year, Corteva, our visionary sponsor, computer, financial and tech drinker, supporting sponsors SPI, Fera USA, Npdc and the Nature Conservancy.

I just really feel like, honestly, you know, you kind of have that proof of concept, stage at the beginning, like, let’s launch this and see if there’s some real validity to it. Can we fill a gap in the existing space of, associations and industry groups out there? And indeed, I feel like we’ve now established ourself. And, the next step is on us, frankly, to kind of tighten this up and, formalize a going forward path, which I think we’re we’re set to go.

So that was awesome. I know you’re going to talk a little bit about our keynote, Ted McKinney. And, I’ll let you do that in a second. I just want to before I pass it over to you, just say, regarding our awards of excellence, all four winners were in attendance this year, which was really, really super great.

And as I mentioned, during Tech Hub Live, we had a lot of submissions this year and it was truly competitive. a lot of good folks. And, just one more congratulations to, Lindsey Ross, from Legacy Co-op for the precision tag, advisor entrepreneur of the year, Lanny Faleide, Legacy in Ag technology.

He’s been around for a long time, as you all know. president of Satshot. Blake Matthews, precision farmer of the year from Matthews Land and Cattle. And finally,  Nancy Bohl Bormann, the, technology educator, researcher of the year. she’s a PhD candidate at University of Minnesota. So congratulations to all you guys. really well-deserved. And I’m glad you were all there to accept it in person.

ES: Thanks for that, Lara. Can any any event you attend in the marketplace, usually you have a keynote speaker, somebody who’s well versed in the agriculture or whatever field you’re talking about, or hoping to be, interested in when you’re attending an event and at Tech Hub Live, we were honored enough to be having, Ted McKinney, who’s the CEO with the National Association of State, Department of Agriculture, who was our keynote, speaker and, you know, don’t have a don’t have a video clip of Ted.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take that while I was there, but my takeaways from his speech, again, he talked a lot, a little bit about, you know, climate and, you know, the sustainability, the agriculture movement. but then, of course, we were at tech meetings. So he did bring up technology and advances in technology. And his big takeaway was that, you know, although we’ve seen lightning rapid technology advancements over the last year or so, that he believes the pace of technology advancement is only going to accelerate so that by the time we gather for next year’s Tech Hub Live event in mid-July in 2025, the The landscape for technology and agriculture may look vastly different and very improved from where we are right now. Today. Yeah, yeah. You know, I really did enjoy his keynote as well. you know, Ted’s background, you know, he grew up on a farm, but he’s done a lot of various, positions at the state level. Federal level, during his time at USDA, he worked a lot on, trade, and I like that.

He kind of connected the dots, you know, kind of where we’re at. Why it matters. what happens here? What are the global ramifications of trade policy tariffs? a lot of uncertainty, of course, around, the, elections later this year and how that might impact, you know, trade. But it was great. He really kind of went around the world and came home and, touched every issue, you know, in, in between the two.

So it was great. Really did enjoy his talk. Yeah. No, it was good. So hey. And speaking of talks, of course, one of the things you and I had the pleasure of doing and, we’ve done is now for three years running, we get together with attendees, folks who are at the event, and we sit down in front of a roaring fireplace, which is video provided.

And, of course, the, we sit in chairs and we interview folks, in the marketplace. I know I think we had, maybe 15, maybe 16, what we call fireside chats at this year’s event. I know I had, I think ten myself, 9 or 10. And you had a good balance as well. And one of the, one of the people you talked to was a good friend of ours here at CropLife.

LS: Amy Asmus,  co-owner of Estimates Farm Supply in Rake, Iowa, and also the acting chairperson right now for the Agricultural Retailers Association. And, I gotta admit, you know, I’ll let you take it from here, but, Amy brought up a one word topic that she wanted to discuss. And I know that pretty much everyone in the audience sort of stopped what they were doing.

The listen. So I’ll, I’ll let you tell our viewers about that. And then, we should be able to go to a video clip that goes into the details, shall we say. It was funny because Amy and I ran into each other in the hallway before our fireside chat, and, you know, there were so many things that we could have talked about, and we only had ten minutes.

So I said, you know, Amy, we’re, you know, we’re we’re. What would you like to talk about with what things should we hit? And she said, toilets. And naturally, you know, it’s like, okay, explain. Basically this was her segway into tech technology kind of a what’s working and what’s not. And she said, you know, I’ve noticed here, at the convention center that the toilets aren’t they don’t automatically flush.

Whereas, you know, we’re we’ve become accustomed to, you know, when you’re in the airport or when you’re traveling out and about, you know, you don’t have to flush the toilets anymore because they’re, you know, they go on, those. Yeah. Well, let’s, let’s let’s hear that. Amy, I did actually have to say in this clip. So in retail, how we figure the metrics on if it’s, successful adoption of that technology or not.

And then the last thing we kind of think about is, what about those people who didn’t adopt? Or what about those people who did adopt? And now we’re lazy and they don’t think about the details. If they’re in a situation where that technology is not available and so I said, the perfect example is when I come here, sorry, everybody in the audience, but three out of five times I go into the bathroom and the toilet’s not flushed.

You know why they’re not automatic flushing toilets. Everybody’s used to automatic flushing toilets. And, when you’re used to it, you assume it’s just going to happen. And you get up and you go about your day. And one of the things we have to think about when we adopt technology is, what if it doesn’t happen? How are we going to cover for that?

Can we just go on with our day? assuming that technology is always going to be there? so that was one of the things we talked about toilets. Yeah, yeah. And so, toilets and technology, that can be my tag for the day. So that was our good friend Amy, and it’s, you know, I was going to say a keyword I never would expected to have heard at an agricultural event.