AEM Wins Agri-Marketing Assn. Award for Manufacturing Express Initiative

Apr 24, 2025

The Manufacturing Express Tour coordinated in 2024 by the Assn. of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) recently earned a “Best of NAMA” award from the National Agri-Marketing Assn. for the campaign’s success in support of the public engagement initiative which covered 20 states and made 80 stops.

The Assn. of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) recently announced that its communications, public affairs, and public relations teams has earned a “Best of NAMA” Award for its campaign in support of the AEM Manufacturing Express public engagement initiative. The Leawood, Kan., National Agri-Marketing Assn. (NAMA) presented AEM with the award during NAMA’s 2025 Agri-Marketing Conference, held April 9-11 in Kansas City, Mo.

The AEM Manufacturing Express tour covered 20 states and made stops at more than 80 equipment manufacturers’ facilities in the Midwest, South, Mid-Atlantic, and states around the Great Lakes in the summer and fall of 2024. AEM’s public relations campaign for the tour was recognized in the “Company or Producer-Funded PR Campaign directed to consumers.”

“The team at the Association of Equipment Manufacturers is incredibly honored to be recognized with a Best of NAMA award for their work on the Manufacturing Express,” said Megan Tanel, President & CEO of AEM. “Our team as well as the member companies who hosted us last summer, put in an extraordinary amount of work and passion to bring the Manufacturing Express events to life, and this recognition is a testament to their dedication and creativity in telling the story of the men and women who make up the modern off-road equipment manufacturing industry.”

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Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators