AIM attracts international visitors | Farmtario

Germany, Ethiopia, South Africa, Australia, Bangladesh and the U.S. were represented in the Ag in Motion attendance demographics this year.

International attention has grown steadily over the years. Foreign visitors are attracted to everything from equipment and manufacturing to the software, technology, and practices. Some came to see how things vary from their own country.

“Technology is similar, but of the few places we’ve been to, everything is just bigger. Because it needs to be [in Canada],” said Malcolm Brown, a grain farmer from New South Wales, Australia, who was part of an Alberta-Saskatchewan tour.

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Peter Mills, from Western Australia, also took the tour. He said he uses a 60-foot seeder and a 40-foot combine.

Australian farmers have a much larger window, they explained. With seven weeks to seed and seven to harvest, there’s not as much pressure to complete the season.

Kate Mills of Western Australia was shocked by the number of people working on single operations in Canada.

“We farm with our three sons,” she said. “And we went [to a farm] yesterday and they’ve got the parents then they branch out into the children and the grandchildren. And they’ve got like 30 something 1000 acres. There’s a lot of more people for the same area here [in Canada].”

Trey Price, of Price Brothers Equipment in Wichita, Kansas, and Henok Dejene, an importer exporter from Ethiopia, were at the show to assess the equipment and build relationships with Canadian manufacturers. Both men were at AIM for the first time and said they were amazed by the show’s offerings.

Price equated farm shows to Christmas, saying this one is a big shopping trip. He was impressed with the technology and innovation coming out of Canada, but he was most interested in grain handling and harvest equipment, as that’s what a lot of his dealers are looking for.

“There’s a lot of really great companies in Canada,” he said. “There’s some pretty cool innovation that we see up in Canada that we don’t necessarily need yet in the US. We’re spoiled because our growing season is longer and our margin for error on the harvest is longer.”

Price’s goal was to make a few deals to bring row crop equipment to his dealers, and he said he’s leaving AIM with two strong deals.

Dejene said he’s also starting some deals because of AIM, as he was there to assess equipment such as tractors, combines, and irrigation pumps to import to Ethiopia. He was also interested in the use of drones in agriculture and said he hadn’t seen them used in this way before.

“We have enough human resources, sometimes using this kind of technology is very nice,” he said. “You can use it for fertilizing, you can use it just for watching, you can use it for diseases and right away take action.”