Stop me if you’ve heard this one before — I’m hitting the road again.

It’s been nice to settle down and stay put for a few weeks after a busy summer of traveling to lots of farms all over the East Coast and Midwest. But now it’s time to venture into two totally different parts of the world and see what agricultural trends are taking root.

California Dreamin’

Next week (10/20-10/24), I’ll be headed to FIRA USA in Sacramento, Calif. It will be my third year in a row attending the conference and I am eager to see what has changed in the last calendar year. If I learned one thing from attending the event in 2023 and then again in 2024, it’s that the topic of technology in agriculture grows FAST. Maybe even faster than the weeds on your farm are growing.

The event, for those who are unfamiliar with it, is all about the latest and greatest products, services, companies and ideas in the world of agricultural technology. And as you might guess, AI and autonomy in agriculture has become a hot topic at the event and continues to produce new and innovative ideas and implements each year.

Last year I had a hard time narrowing down the best three weed suppression tools in autonomy after the event — and that’s just one subcategory.

Big Leagues

And if attending FIRA USA next week wasn’t enough, in less than one month’s time, I’ll be hopping on another plane to go to one of the largest agricultural events in the world — Agritechnica in Germany. While Lessiter Media has had editorial representation at that event for years, this will be my first time attending and I cannot wait to see what the event has in store.

While making my travel arrangements for Agritechnica, I was conversing with one of the event’s coordinators and when I referred to the event as a “conference,” she laughed and told me that word would not even begin to describe the size and impact of the event. In 2023, the event had record-breaking attendance at just shy of half a million attendees from nearly 150 different countries.

So What?

So now that you know my travel plans for the next few weeks, I have two requests for all you readers out there.

First of all, if any of you are going to be at FIRA USA or Agritechnica, please don’t hesitate to say hello if you see me there. It’s always nice to meet our audience and it only helps me grow in my understanding of what matters most to farmers and ag advisors and anyone else following along out there.

And lastly, if you’re busy with harvest and other tasks around the farm — understandably so — then let me do the hard work for you. The reason I attend events like these is to gather info for our busy farmers who can’t get away from the farm to attend these events themselves. So don’t hesitate to reach out to me and ask about specific topics or products that you want to hear more about. I’ll do my very best to roundup what matters most from these two key events in the world of agricultural technology.