At MOTIF we work with many amazing companies and individuals who are doing great things in the business world and as members of the community. This year we’ve started an initiative to provide them with a platform to tell their stories and how we’ve helped them bring their ideas and projects to life.
This is CONNECT Ag – Celebrating Women in Agriculture.
CONNECT Ag is a yearly event presented by Emerge Ag Solutions–a crop supply retailer based out of Eston and Kyle, Saskatchewan. The event was created to have a focus on agriculture awareness, appreciation, and support for all members of the farming community around the world, uniting people and enhancing lives through agriculture.
What was the theme for this year’s event?
Farm women are, more often than not, the centre and heart of the farm. They are involved in every aspect of the farm, whether it’s operating machinery, balancing the books, running in for parts, marketing grain, delivering calves, cooking meals, caring for the yard and everything in between. They can be heavily involved in the farming operation, the cook and caretaker of the home, nurturer of the children, or working off the farm, but they are the support and sounding board of their operations. These women are independent, resilient, patient, and hard-working humans that are devoted to their families.
What does the event consist of?
CONNECT – The Heart of the Farm is a two-day conference that is jam-packed with talented speakers, a tradeshow with merchandise, photo booths, great meals, and a celebrity speaker. We have breakout sessions and panel discussions based on the feedback we receive in the prior year that covers: stress management/mental health, agriculture awareness/advocacy, human resources/recruitment, financial planning, farm safety, marketing, risk management, health & wellness, social media, and equipment purchasing. We also have cooking demonstrations, an opening reception, and a lot of fun.
What are your goals for the event?
The primary goal of this event is to have fun and show our genuine appreciation for farm women and give them the recognition they deserve.
The second goal is to provide a comfortable setting for women to gain education, knowledge, and inspiration to help them grow.
Thirdly, this event is a platform for farm women to network and get to know other farm women and industry people. They build relationships that can be carried on long after the event through an online community.
Women are continually becoming more prevalent in agriculture. We would like to use this event to focus on and recognize what women need and want to move forward in agriculture.
How does CONNECT Apparel fit in?
We thought it would be a good idea right from our very first event to have promotional items at the events. We started to focus on clothing and creating trendy designs that people would want to wear and set out to create a clothing line with a purpose. As the brand grows it will serve as a link to connect people to agriculture. There is a disconnect happening in our culture between the people producing the food and the people buying the food every day. Our goal is to help bridge that gap to help people understand the value of what we can produce and how important it is to keep agriculture and the science behind it functioning and progressing.
Our hope is to become a known social enterprise and our goal is that every time a person buys a piece of CONNECT Apparel they will be directed to our message of connecting the world to agriculture.
In addition to promoting agriculture and connecting with consumers, CONNECT Apparel will be contributing an agriculture package of quality seeds, inputs, tools, and training to a farmer in a developing country. We want families to farm for many generations to come and we hope that CONNECT Apparel can help.
How was your experience working with MOTIF?
It has been an absolute pleasure working with MOTIF–the processes have been top notch! From start to finish and everything in between we were very pleased with your team. The assistance in choosing the garments was sure nice, as it’s overwhelming looking through books or on websites through different suppliers trying to narrow down the ones that you think might work best. I am not a designer and don’t have the programs to make the designs look professional, so having your support and creativity in turning some of the sketches into the actual designs we printed on the clothing was so vital in having our finished product turn out so well.
Everything arrived as expected, and you accommodated our tight timeframe. The garments were well-received by our conference attendees and they would be wearing them the same day they bought them, so they must have been pretty excited about their new purchase. It’s been a pleasure working with MOTIF!
