With harvest season complete, it’s officially meeting season now in the Carolinas. I’m Mike Davis and coming up on Tuesday the first big meeting of the year will take place at the Greenville Convention Center in Greenville, North Carolina. It’s the Farming the Future Conference sponsored by Coastal Agrobusiness. Jim Pearce is vice president of marketing and product development with Coastal.
Yes, it’s a series of conferences we’ve been putting on for several years and we call this informing the future and our topic. This year is the business of farming. We’ve done these series of conferences over the years mainly focusing on agronomic information to get out to the farming community, our clients and whatnot. And we’ve decided this year with the way economic trends go that it’s probably good to do a series on just the business of farming those aspects that our clientele needs to really focus on to keep their farm alive and prospering in the future is if you really think about it. We’ve come from though family farms and whatnot and there’s still a lot of those around but really, farming has become a business these days. And so we thought it’d be a great time to present information that is really relevant to the business of farming.
Pearce tells me they have a star-studded lineup of presenters.
We’ve got Mark Purdy, he’s with an Aimpoint Research and their firm actually plays war games and projects I’ll put different industries and whatnot are going to look like in the future so Mark Purdy is gonna be with us. And then we also have our keynote is gonna be Rob Sharkey. He’s better known as the Shark Farmer. A lot of people have seen him on RFD TV, on different podcasts, and he does a lot of us segments on PBS. And then the afternoon session, we have a panel of lawyers from Ward and Smith, and they focus on the business aspects of forming estate planning, succession planning for the farm, and they have a lot of farming clients that they deal with.
The last session on Tuesday after lunch will bring all the speakers together for an open Q&A.
Yes, we’ve got it set up where those people that are attending, our clients and customers. and whatnot will be able to, to ask questions and get straight direct answers from all of our speakers throughout the day. So Mark, Rob, and the team from Ward and Smith will be part of this panel discussion. So if you have questions from the floor, we’ll take those and you know and hopefully that was first and conversation and maybe clarify some things or those things that they’ve heard throughout the day if asked specific questions,
The Farming the Future Conference, it’s free and includes lunch, walk up registration is open Tuesday morning between eight and nine at the Greenville Convention Center.