American Society of Agronomy

{Photo from https://www.acsmeetings.org}

The annual meeting for the American Society of Agronomy (ASA)* is right around the corner (October 16 – 19) in San Antonio. Six years ago I attended my first ASA meeting in Salt Lake City, UT. Going to professional meetings is a great opportunity for us to engage with our customers and gain valuable feedback. It allows us to put a face to a name and learn more about their research. Some customers will share unique and innovative applications of our products. Others will share ideas for new sensor development. Another valuable tool is to resolve customers’ concerns about sensor performance and quality. Many of the incremental improvements continuously made to our core products can be connected to information received from customers.

This year Apogee is sponsoring two workshops prior to the meetings with Decagon Devices. The workshops are “Soil Moisture and Hydraulic Properties Measurement Instrumentation Theory, Application, and Hands-on Training” and “Plant Measurements from Leaf to Canopy: Light and Temperature Interaction.” Apogee has sponsored workshops in the past with Decagon and these have proven to be great experiences to work with researchers using a variety of instruments from several companies.

One of the things I like best about tradeshows and annual meetings is the interaction with customers. Many times marketing consists of putting out information unidirectionally. Print ads, websites and many other marketing avenues do not allow us to engage with our customers and discover if the intended concept was received correctly. Tradeshows allow us to do this, which in turn leads to improvements in how we communicate through our website and other medium.

At this year’s meeting we will be introducing an aspirated radiation shield, a hand-held meter for our infrared sensor and a new field-of-view option for our infrared sensor. We have also developed a 4 – 20 milliAmp output for our solar radiation sensors. We look forward meeting you at this year’s meeting. Please stop by booth 606 and say hello.

* ASA combines each year with the Crop Science Society of America (CSSA) and the Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) for their annual meetings. We used the letters ASA to make the post more concise. We are excited to join with the Canadian Society of Soil Science for this years meeting.

Devin Overly
General Manager