Information Session for Value-added Crops Coming Up

Carolina farmers are always looking for value-added crops and the North Carolina Biotechnology Center is offering a webinar in early June to show those interested in those types of crops some options.
 

Greg Smith Curriculum Coordinator for the Bionetwork/Bio-processing Center, part of the North Carolina Community College System explains who might be interested in the upcoming webinar:
 

“Biotechnology that relates to agriculture, anywhere from farmers all the way up to industry professionals that are involved in the biotech agricultural business in the state of North Carolina.”
 

Smith explains the proposed content of the upcoming webinar:
 

“The title of the presentation is ‘Opportunites for North Carolina Farmers and Growers to Produce a Higher Value Crop’, and we have two presenters for our webinar that day, we have the Trait Knowledge Manager, Dr. Kirk Frances from BASF Plant Science, and we have Jeff Riddle, who is the Grower Relations Manager from Technology Crops International, and both of them will be sharing their expertise in agriculture and how it relates to biotechnology and how farmers can grow value-added crops. And one of the things that is a part of the discussion that they will be leading will be discussions of how their companies, being some of the leaders of biotechnology in the state, can help farmers develop different crop varieties that higher yields, crops that require fewer inputs, thereby saving the growers some money.”
 

And Smith explains further some of the topics:
 

“Opportunities to grow crops for specialized markets on a contract basis. So, there’s a lot of different things that they’ll be doing, and this is something that we’ve actually been interested in for a long time because we’re number one in the world in agricultural biotech here in North Carolina, and in conjunction with the North Carolina Biotechnology Center we felt that this would be an important topic to discuss as a part of one of our free webinars.”
 

Smith outlines the time and date:
 

“We’re actually going to be having this webinar on June the 7th starting at 10:00 and it should last about an hour, and we will have an opportunity for people to type in through a chat box questions for the presenters that we have, and the presenters can have some time at the end of the session to answer these questions. If you cannot make it on this day, we record the event and make it available for you to watch at a later time.”
 

‘Attending’ the informational webinar is easy, according to Smith:
 

“A computer with an internet connection and some speakers, so you can hear that’s all you really need. We have people that watch our webinars from their offices, from their homes, from their laptops that they carry with them wherever they are on the road. Anywhere you can get an internet connection and have audio you can watch one of our webinars.”
 

For more information visit the Bio Network site.