Speaker Series

Discover how strategic land forming can transform challenging fields into productive, resilient assets for your farm. Join Jordan Wallace, a leading expert in precision agriculture from GPS Ontario, as he shares practical insights from a recent land-forming project at the Ottawa Smart Farm. This session addresses real-world solutions to combat waterlogging, improve soil health, and increase crop yield through targeted land-forming techniques. Learn about soil amendment strategies, effective drainage management, and key steps for maintaining soil biology in saturated fields. Walk away with actionable tools to optimize your fields and adapt to changing conditions, enhancing both productivity and sustainability.

Bio: Jordan Wallace is a highly regarded expert in precision agriculture and advanced field technology solutions, specializing in sustainable land management and soil health improvement. As the Advanced Solutions Technician at GPS Ontario, Jordan has spearheaded innovative projects focused on improving farm efficiency, productivity, and resilience against extreme weather conditions. With a strong background in practical technology applications, Jordan brings a wealth of knowledge on implementing adaptive land-forming practices, based on extensive work with fields at the Ottawa Smart Farm. His insights are grounded in real-world challenges, including water management and soil biology, positioning him as a valuable resource for farmers seeking to optimize land use in today’s variable climate.

Moe has over 42+ years of experience in trading markets, commodity risk management and marketing, the last 20 years with Farms.com Risk Management. His primary areas of expertise include grains, basis, livestock, feed, futures/options, energy/diesel, fertilizer/input purchases and both technical and fundamental analysis with a global and local market perspective.

Farms.com Risk Management is a Commodity Research Boutique specializing in providing commodity market information and insight to farmers and agribusinesses across North America.

Andres Hurtado is the co-founder of Terranova UAV, an agricultural drone service company. Terranova UAV provides precision agriculture services by integrating different technologies such as multispectral imagery, drone imagery, photogrammetry, and AI to help farmers reduce costs, emissions and increase yields.

Andres is an entrepreneur with more than 15 years of engineering and project management experience. He attained his Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering at the University of Antioquia in Colombia in 2007 and holds a Master of Business Administration degree from the Ivey Business School at Western University in 2015, where he completed a certification in entrepreneurship.

During his time at Western, Andres taught and coached undergraduate students in entrepreneurship and business at the Baikal State University in Irkutsk, Russia.

Justin Shepherd is a Senior Economist at FCC. He joined the team in 2021, specializing in monitoring agricultural production and analyzing global supply and demand trends. In addition to his speaking engagements on agriculture and economics, Justin is a regular contributor to the FCC Economics blog.

Background

Justin grew up on a mixed farm in Saskatchewan and remains active in the family operation. He holds a master of applied economics and management from Cornell University and a bachelor of agribusiness from the University of Saskatchewan.

About FCC

FCC is Canada’s leading agriculture and food lender, dedicated to the industry that feeds the world. FCC employees are committed to the long-standing success of those who produce and process Canadian food by providing flexible financing, AgExpert business management software, information and knowledge. FCC provides a complement of expertise and services designed to support the complex and evolving needs of food businesses. As a financial Crown corporation, FCC is a stable partner that reinvests profits back into the industry and communities it serves. For more information, visit fcc.ca.

Join Shawn Brenneman, Provincial Soil & Crop Director and the rest of St. Clair Regional Soil and Crop directors (comprised of Essex, Chatham-Kent, Lambton County Associations) for our Annual General Meeting. Find out what’s going on in the region, 2025 research trials, upcoming grants cost-share programs, workshops and activities.

The Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association (OSCIA), founded in 1939, is a grassroots, not-for-profit farm organization. The Association is represented by more than 50 local county and district branches within 11 regions of the province, and our dedicated membership has significant representation in all commodity groups.