Adventures in Agriculture - Calder Benham Talks About His Adventure
Sponsored each year by the Rotary Club of Regina, Adventures in Agriculture is held during the Canadian Western Agribition and provides students an opportunity to tour major agriculture based industries, and participate in networking and information sessions conducted by agriculture industry professionals and business leaders. 2012’s Dryden candidate was Calder Benham.
Calder attended the five day event this past November along with 13 other students from central Canada. After registration each student was taken to their host families. The following morning, November 22nd , they had a tour of Redhead Equipment and Ralph MacKay Industries before attending a Rotary luncheon. After lunch the students saw the acclaimed Canadian Western Agribition Livestock Show, followed by supper and Calder’s first rodeo.
Next day, November 23rd, was a tour of the John Deere plant to see the latest technology in farm machinery before heading off to the University of Regina and a tour of the massive Weyburn Inland Terminals. November 24th had the students back at the university to take a tour of the agriculture experiments before returning to the Agribition with an evening banquet.
The last day was about pictures and awards before everyone headed back home. Calder thanked the Dryden Rotary for sponsoring him. A bonus for him was seeing his older brother there showing some animals for the college he was attending. When asked about how this trip might have affected his thoughts about a career in repairing heavy equipment, he talked about how huge and complex heavy farm equipment has become and how much more computers are used to automatically diagnose and report problems.. So for the time being, he’s now leaning a bit more towards those smaller motors.