Remembering The InfoAg Conference: 1995 to 2023
July 12, 2023 At the end of June, The Fertilizer Institute (TFI) held the annual InfoAg Conference in St. Louis, MO. And as it turns out, this was the last time the show will be held.
At that event, the association announced that starting in 2024, a new show will take place – the Agronomy Conference & Expo. This will occur in St. Louis, MO, at the Union Station Hotel from August 12-14. According to TFI representatives, this new show ties back to the association’s efforts to “widen the scope of the event to include all aspects of the ag industry, including such sectors as crop inputs and biologicals as well as technology.”
Starting almost 30 years ago, the first InfoAg Conference was held in 1995 in Champaign, IL at the Chancellor Hotel. Sponsored by the Foundation for Agronomic Research and the International Plant Nutrition Institute (IPNI), the show was shepherded for many years by IPNI’s Dr. Harold Reetz “as a way to promote the Information Age in agriculture,” with an emphasis on precision agriculture.
“Progressive dealerships have always helped their customers solve production problems,” said a representative from Cenex/Land ‘O Lakes at the 1995 show. “Precision agriculture is just another tool dealerships can use to accomplish that objective.”
Many of those early shows featured plenty of information and companies catering to the then fledgling precision agriculture industry. Attendance at those first few shows steadily grew, from several hundred guests at the 1995 InfoAg Conference to approximately 700 attendees for the 2007 InfoAg Conference held in Springfield, IL.
An annual event in its first three years, the InfoAg Conference ultimately settled into a biennial year timing throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. The show also outgrew its Champaign, IL, location, holding InfoAg Conferences in West Lafayette, IN, Indianapolis, IN, and Springfield. The event finally settled upon its current location in St. Louis starting in 2014. This was also around the time the InfoAg Conference went back to being an annual show (which kicked off with the 2013 show).
In 2018, the InfoAg Conference was taken over by TFI from IPNI. At that time, the association began a slow transformation of the event to include many of the principles of its 4R initiative (right source, right rate, right time, and right place). Besides precision agriculture, the InfoAg Conference started focusing on such areas as soil health and proper crop nutrient management in the program.
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