Over the past weeks and months, our company Euralis Seeds organized several virtual field days, mainly in oilseed rape. We had sown the crop in August 2019, thinking we could show our progress in the usual face to face field days. However, the corona pandemic threw a spanner in the wheel. So, we worked on what alternative ways we could find where we could share our varieties, and market trends with our customers.
We were able to transform basically all of the planned field days into virtual days, and it went very well. We had on average 50 to 80 participants in our virtual meetings, consisting of farmers, distributors, and even competitors!
By organizing a virtual field day, it was our philosophy that our audience did not want to watch the so-called ‘talking heads’ for 1 or 2 hours, so we tried to make sure we had an attractive formula, not only sharing commercial information about our varieties, but also a future outlook, including markets trends etc.
There are several benefits to organizing our field days in a virtual way. One of these is that all the video material is still available weeks and months after the actual event. We created attractive content and we will be able to use that for some time to come. Some examples of such content can be found here: https://dnipola.euralis.pl/ . Also, people can participate to the virtual field days from wherever they are, from their office, from a business trip abroad, or even from their holiday location.
There are several aspects of the face to face field days that I miss, especially the direct social contact, where we as a company get a lot of useful information about local conditions, weather, pathogens, and so on. In addition, farmers like to feel the plants, see the soil for themselves, and this is not possible in a virtual event. I think that virtual events are more for exchanging information, and real events have a much deeper emotional level to it.
All our customers were satisfied, and we even got compliments from our competitors saying that we did a great job. I am firmly convinced that we will be seeing more of such virtual events in the future. We are now getting ready for our field days of corn, in the fall of 2020, with a virtual component. We are already building on the experience from our earlier virtual field days and make them even more attractive for our customers.
