Seeds were planted in agri-tech during flash meetings on a whirlwind trip to San Francisco for Mayor Jyoti Gondek and local economic leaders, including the Calgary Stampede.
Mayor Gondek attended the 2024 World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit that took place in San Francisco on March 18 and 19. It’s a conference that brings together 2,400 agri-food businesses, food brands, growers and tech providers for networking, marketing and startup discovery.
She said that as part of the work she’s doing with Calgary Economic Development, she joined up with the Calgary Stampede to talk about innovation in agriculture, how technology can be used, locating businesses in the city, and possibly hosting this kind of conference in Calgary.
“It was a bit of a whirlwind. There were 20-minute meetings with different startups back-to-back-to-back for most of Wednesday,” Mayor Gondek said.
Bringing the Calgary Stampede along with a natural fit for the event, the mayor said. Quite often, the Stampede is seen as a 10-day summer event, she said, with many overlooking the agricultural roots of the organization. Being able to leverage their expertise and reputation was an opportunity to connect the tech sector to local agriculture.
“If you can bring those innovators up here to talk to you, the folks that are actually doing agricultural work, I think that’s a great way to connect people,” she said.
“Frankly, to create a strong agriculture and agri-tech hub, up in Calgary makes a lot more sense to me than doing it in some other city.”
The Government of Alberta’s Agri-food Investment and Growth Strategy was launched back in 2020. The goal was to draw investment and economic growth to the province through agricultural processing capacity. Alberta’s agriculture exports in 2022 were more than $16.1 billion.
Natural fit for Calgary Stampede participation: CEO
Calgary Stampede CEO Joel Cowley said that a lot of people look at the Stampede’s first year – 1912 – as the beginning of the organization. He said it goes back further than that to 1884, and the launch of the Calgary and District Agricultural Society.
“To put it pretty simply, it’s kind of in our DNA, and it really remains a central part of what we do today,” he told LiveWire Calgary.
He said while they continue to educate people – particularly youth – on the importance of agriculture in their daily lives, it’s important to recognize the role technology is going to play in feeding a growing global population that’s estimated to hit 10 billion by 2050.
“What that means is we’re going have to feed more people with less land; it’s going to take technology,” he said.
“We take it as our mission to educate people on these technologies so that they’ll be more accepting of those and creating a safe and wholesome food supply.”
Cowley said the Stampede’s name recognition broke down some doors while they were in San Francisco. He said connections with an international audience for their annual show does draw people here – not only to attend the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth, but to conduct business, too.
This summer the Calgary Stampede will also introduce a youth robotics competition, to be held at the expanded BMO Centre. It will help expose young people to potential careers in agriculture that tie in with technology, Cowley said.
“It will be a more traditional type of competition that they normally have, but 30 days before Stampede, we’re going to bring them together and give them some agricultural challenges that are related to robotics,” he said.
He said they were a natural fit to attend the agri-tech conference with Mayor Gondek, particularly as Calgary carves out its niche in the technology landscape.
“The skills that you’re looking at in other areas of technology are directly applicable to the agricultural industry,” he said.
“A lot of these technologies that we saw there, they add value for the producers here, too. So, you really get kind of a double boost out of this – you create jobs, but then you also add value to our entire agricultural sector.”
