The Badlands Community Facility was quite busy this week with a number of farmers attending a large conference.
Over 100 attendees were on hand for the 2024 edition of Crop Marketing Made Cool, Tuesday, December 3rd through December 5th. Ryan Denis, the host of the What The Futures podcast and organizer of the conference, felt Drumheller was a great place to host an event like this. “I have little kids and so we’ve been spending our summers in Drumheller, the last couple, and honestly the dinosaur thing, I thought, would be cool. It was my first time putting on this type of conference, this scale and I thought the dinosaurs would be a nice little add and the facility as well. It is fantastic, just top notch, and of course, supporting local businesses. We wanted to support local restaurants, we wanted to support the local brewery. We just wanted to make sure we could be in a town where we would have a little financial impact heading into the holidays.” Denis and his team have appreciated the welcoming feeling provided by Drumheller for their event.
The sold out event was about crop marketing but it ends up being so much more according to Denis. “Crop marketing can be a topic that is a little bit dry at times. We wanted to make sure we had a great mix of speakers with all sorts of topics. We wanted to give farmers time to connect and talk to each other. We brought in games and toys to lighten up a mood. This was also inspired by me going to a concert last summer and was thinking wouldn’t it be cool to have more of a concert feel with a merch tent where all the merch was free to try to lighten the mood.”
Including financial benefits for the community, Denis and his team wanted to provide financial support to a non-profit group in the Drumheller Valley. “Part of the goal was to support local and find a charity we could do some good for. We had a silent auction, we had donations from some of the speakers, and with all the bids we tallied up to just over $9,500.” They have chosen to donate the funds to the Drumheller Salvation Army to be used for the Christmas Hamper program or whatever needs that Salvation Army has during this time of year.
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