Come to the 2026 Fort Wayne Farm Show

Dec 31, 2025

By John E. Woodmansee

The Fort Wayne Farm Show is set for January 13-15 at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne. The Farm Show will be open from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM on January 13, from 9:00 AM to 8:00 PM on January 14, and from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM on January 15.

The show will feature a major farm manufacturing and distributor trade show, and educational seminars sponsored by Purdue Extension and Northeastern Indiana Soil and Water Conservation Districts. All the educational sessions will take place in the Appleseed Room A, next to the main exhibit floor.

On Tuesday at 10:00 AM, a Midwest Ag Market Outlook will be presented by David Kohli and John Cavanaugh, WOWO Market Analysts, and Rob Winters, WOWO Farm Director. Ryan Martin, Farm Origination Specialist with Louis Dreyfus Co., will add a weather outlook.

At noon, Elysia Rodgers, Purdue Extension Educator, will present “Barnyard mirror: how animals reflect our own health.”

At 2:00 PM, a pesticide applicator and anhydrous ammonia safety seminar will commence, with PARP credit available. Speakers will include a representative from The Office of the Indiana State Chemist, Ann Kline, Purdue Extension Educator, and James Wolff, Purdue Extension Educator. The Indiana Corn Marketing Council and the Indiana Soybean Alliance will sponsor PARP credits. Attendance from start to finish of this 2-hour program is required for PARP credit.

On Wednesday at 10:00 AM, Michael Langemeier, Director of the Center for Commercial Agriculture at Purdue University, will present a market outlook.

Source : purdue.edu

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