Sidney Women in Agriculture Conference Returns August 21

May 07, 2026

“Shaping Ag Communities” is the theme of the 2026 Sidney Women in Agriculture Conference. The highly anticipated event returns on Friday, August 21, 2026, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the Elks Lodge in Sidney, Nebraska. This engaging, full-day event brings together those involved in agriculture to learn, connect, and share ideas.

Event Highlights

Attendees can look forward to a dynamic lineup of speakers, hands-on workshops, and valuable networking opportunities focused on strengthening agriculture and rural communities.

Keynote Speaker: Kelly Dean

This year’s keynote speaker, Kelly Dean, brings a compelling story of resilience, career growth, and returning to her roots.

Raised in Dalton, Kelly grew up farming alongside her family and still proudly calls the community home. After earning her nursing degree in 2003, she worked as a registered nurse in Arizona, Colorado, and Nebraska before returning to western Nebraska with her husband, Jerod, to raise their family. Since 2012, she has served as a nursing instructor at Western Nebraska Community College, mentoring future healthcare professionals while also earning her master’s degree in nursing.

Today, Kelly and her family are back in agriculture through their business, JK Dean Ag, reconnecting with their roots in the family seed corn operation. In 2022, a family health crisis shifted her perspective and highlighted the importance of support and connection. That experience led her to create her blog, “Better Together,” where she shares reflections on resilience, community, and personal growth.

Source : unl.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