GREAT FALLS — The Glacier County Extension Office is organizing conferences on different topics each Tuesday and Thursday in January, and the series of online conferences to help farmers and ranchers is proving more popular than first thought.
This is in place of the annual “Next Generation” in-person conference that isn’t being held in 2021 because of the pandemic. The sessions include topics such as crops, livestock, family communication, business planning, and succession planning topics. The topic for the January 19 conference is marketing.
“Our 'Next Generation' conference, we really try to get the business side of things along with succession planning. So every year after our conference, we have evaluations from everyone. We go through and read their comments on that year’s speakers and see what their needs are,” said Kari Lewis, Glacier County Extension Agent, when asked how the topics for this year’s conferences were chosen.
As of Tuesday, Lewis said, around 500 people from several states and countries had registered for the conferences.
"I definitely did not expect 500 people, and then along with that we've only had two so far and we keep getting more and more people signed up. So by the end of this, it'll be interesting to see what we're actually at for numbers,” said Lewis.
She hopes to be able to have the “Next Generation” conference in person in 2022. For more information, visit MtNextGen.com.
