IAFP 2026 Registration Now Open

Jan 27, 2026

The International Association for Food Protection will hold IAFP 2026, the Association’s Annual Meeting, July 26–29, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Registration and housing are now open via the Association website at: foodprotection.org.

IAFP 2026 will feature hundreds of technical papers, posters, and symposia, detailing current information on a variety of topics relating to food safety. The quantity and quality of contributed presentations provide information on the latest methods and technologies available. In addition to the science-based presentations, the four-day meeting will include committee and Professional Development Group (PDG) meetings and an awards banquet. In addition, more than 140 companies will exhibit their products and services throughout most of the conference.

The IAFP Annual Meeting has earned recognition as the leading food safety conference worldwide and is attended by top industry, academic, and governmental food safety professionals. This broad mix of attendees includes professionals in quality control, processing operations, regulatory inspections, consulting groups, risk assessment, research and development, microbiological research, plant management, technical services, and HACCP management.

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