GOSHEN COUNTY – Mid-morning Thursday, February 1 local agriculture producers gathered for the annual Meyer Seeds Crop Shop 2024 in Torrington for community and of course, corn talk.

“Good morning, guys and thank you for coming today to our, we’re trying to figure it out if this is our ninth or tenth annual crop shop,” Brett Meyer of Meyer Seeds told the audience. 

“Tenth,” Linda Meyer shouted from across the room. 

“Tenth,” Brett repeated to his wife. “Wow, that’s got to be worth a celebration of some kind,” he joked to the audience.

For the last ten years, the entire Meyer family has participated in the annual crop shop.

The event is held to update area corn producers on new advancements being made in the agriculture sector. 

“Today, our plans got changed just a little bit,” Brett informed the awaiting crowd. “Two of our key-note speakers, one of them got sick and one of them is ice fishing.” 

Participants were given many educational handouts and offered Pioneer merchandise. 

Meyer Seeds is no stranger to educating their customers on the newest advancements in corn production.
“It originated, I don’t know how many years ago, way back and this is when the farmers came and purchased their seed, that’s why they call it ‘crop shop,’” Linda Meyer explained. “For us, it’s taking a few minutes to pull everybody together and get some information about how last year went. We talk a lot. We talk about what’s going on through the season, in fact, Brett is in touch with his customers almost continuously depending on the customer’s needs.”

“You know, some farmers. No, I’ll say growers instead of customers because some of them are pretty good friends and if they’re not close friends, they are still good friends,” Linda said.

“Sometimes our farmers aren’t done harvesting and we’re discussing next year’s growing season,” Linda said. “We are a little different here the west here. They have a different growing season. Ours is a little different, but it’s interesting to grow corn in Wyoming, when you look at eastern Nebraska and the corn belt,” she continued. 

Meyer Seeds provided a great meal with the primary focus for producers to kick back and relax for a moment with community members and even neighbors. 

“As we always say with our field day and our crop shop, we want to bring as many of our growers together to sit and talk, to see each other and to remember our community,” Linda said. “They don’t always see each other. I noticed this, it was so cool, we had our presentations from 11 a.m. to about noon or so and then we had Don Day. The hard part, that’s both good and bad, is the buzz in the room of people chatting was pretty awesome.”

Agriculture continues to make advancements and part of the annual event is to catch producers up to speed. 

“He (Brett) has goals with all of his growers,” Linda said. “He’s juggling that, the advancement in technology, it takes time and energy to get into it so we want to lead the way and yet there’s only so much we can do and sometimes it hard.”

The event hosted informational discussion from different industries in agriculture. 

“We had John Jordan is with Pioneer. He’s with the crop protection. He’s with Corveta. I believe that would be the best way to say it,” Linda explained. “See, Corveta owns Pioneer. Pioneer is seed, not crop protection. Corteva, the company that owns Pioneer, is crop protection.”

Other speakers were Don Ilten, Garrett Meyer and Don Day. 

“Brett and I put the event together. Garrett puts the projector up and gets the sound system working and mans that station. Our daughter Tiah, she is in the Army National Guard, and she works for us driving truck and in the seed warehouse.  She helps with everything at crop shop also,” Linda added. “Brett’s mother Vivian Lien makes the amazing lunch. Garrett’s wife Lauren makes the incredible cookies. Dan and Shannon Baker who have worked for us for years do the set up, take down and everything else helpful.”

“We had 70-75 people. People make it and people don’t, but we expect 60 to 80 people for our crop shop,” Linda said. 

Overall, the turn out for this year’s crop shop was a success.