Grey Bruce Farmers’ Week is coming up, and this year it will feature talks on the price of meat, livestock immune systems, genetic improvements, ag tech and more.
There is a beef day, dairy day, goat day, sheep day, ecological day and crops day. The 56th annual event will be virtual again this year and will take place from January 4th to the 11th.
About 70 local, national and international speakers are booked for the week.
On Beef Day, (Jan 5) the keynote speaker is Jennie Hodgen from Merck Animal Health. She’ll talk about what’s happening in the beef industry and how it is affecting the price of meat.
On dairy day, (Jan 6) the keynote speaker is Dr Elad Ben-Ezra, from Zoetis. His talk will be an introduction to the challenges facing the immune system of a newborn calf and what the implications are for vaccination.
Goat Day’s (Jan 7) keynote speaker is Terry Gipson, Goat Extension Leader at Langston University. He’ll talk about genetic improvement in goats.
Sheep Day (Jan 8th) has two keynote speakers. Dr. Don Höglund will talk about the anatomy of skill learning, how sheep and humans learn, and how farmers can use that to their advantage while handling stock.
The second keynote speaker is Dr. Chris Aukland from the UK who will talk about homeopathy and sheep.
On Ecological day, (Jan 10) the keynote speaker is Chris Wooding from Ironwood Organics. His talk is called, “Growing Ecosystems Services, Cost or Benefit?”
Crops day is set for January 11th and will have Scott Shearer from Ohio State University as its keynote speaker. He’ll talk about a digital revolution in ag tech, covering artificial intelligence, cloud computing, internet of things, data standards and exchange, federated IDs, cryptocurrencies, security, data ownership, emerging ecosystems, farming-as-a-service(FaaS), broadband internet access; and supervised and full autonomy.
New this year, is ‘Check Your Tech Tuesday’, which is an opportunity to log in and familiarize yourself with the platform to ensure you can view the presentations smoothly. There will be two live presentations Tuesday as well as a recorded one.
At the end of each day, the live feed will be processed and the videos will be posted roughly 48 hours later. Ticket holders can view the content for 30 days following the event. Tickets range from about $33 to 180.