Full Program Released for the 10th Annual Precision Farming Dealer Summit

Oct 10, 2024

Precision Farming Dealer has announced the full speaker and session lineup confirmed for the 2025 Precision Farming Dealer Summit that is 100% focused on equipping your company to run a more profitable precision farming business. Download the just-released program now.

To be held at the Louisville Marriott Downtown Hotel in Louisville, Ky., on January 6-7, the 2025 Precision Farming Dealer Summit will explore precision farming business development topics of critical importance to top-level decision makers. Discussing the 2025 event, Precision Farming Dealer technology editor Noah Newman says despite the challenges of the last few years, dealers need to continue adapting their precision business to create opportunity out of adversity.

"As drones, autonomy and machine learning gain momentum, dealers need to maneuver their business plans to ensure they are managing their precision business forward into the future,” he says. “We've built this year's program to provide valuable insight from all sides of the industry — dealers, farmers, OEMs and more — that will equip our attendees with actionable takeaways to improve their precision business in 2025 and beyond."

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids