REGINA - Canadian Western Agribition had a strong year in 2024 and are looking forward to a big event again in 2025.
They held their Annual General Meeting on Wednesday in Regina. Michael Latimer, President of Canadian Western Agribition, told reporters prior to that meeting that Agribition 2024 was another strong one.
It was “a success by pretty much every measure that we have,” Latimer said.
“We had just over 145,000 people as our attendants.From a financial standpoint, we profited on operations $74,000, actually almost $75,000. And even just the atmosphere kind of around the park through the week, it was busy. Lots of trade being done. We had record international guests, which is kind of the first time since COVID that we've been able to see those type of numbers from people traveling internationally.”
One priority for Agribition is to keep the show affordable. Latimer said that one challenge they are trying to address is to “maintain the costs of families and just exhibitors, people trying to attend the show, whether it's cattle or trade show.”
Latimer also said they have seen “a lot of inflationary pressures” coming out of the pandemic.
“So we've made a conscious decision to try and keep our prices low. Let's get lots of people on the park. And so we're shooting for kind of that roughly balance.”
As for the profits, Latimer said a lot of those get “reinvested back in the show to make the show better. But overall, when we have the dollars of sponsorship that we get from the community, the number of people attending, we're in a great position going forward.”
That was not to say there weren’t challenges, Latimer said.
“We're not immune to everything that we're seeing in the politics and what's going on south of the border as well when it comes to tariffs and how that may impact us. We're pretty confident that that'll be minimal and a lot of those will be resolved by the time we get to show time. So I think overall we're in a good financial position on that.”
In terms of lessons learned from last year, Latimer said there is “always lots of lessons learned coming out of a show.”
“I think probably the biggest lessons we learn as the show grows, you know, and the complexity of it grows, we really look at how do we start planning further out ahead, right? Like we tend to look kind of, well, what's the next show? What's happening there? We want to start looking, you know, two-year show out, maybe even the three-year show out, just so that we can get a little further out in our planning and then just reduce some of the risk too.”
As for the AGM itself, one of the main items of business was the election for five spots on the board.
“So with an election, that always adds a little bit of excitement. You know, we have some great candidates and going to be happy to work with any of them that get elected.”
Shaun Kindopp, CEO of Agribition, spoke of some of the plans they had in store for the 2025 show.
“We're looking at doing some different family nights,” Kindopp said. “We tried the bullfighting in the last two years which, you know, it didn't get the uptake that we had thought… I think that it is a complicated event, but it was high octane, it was awesome.”
They are also evaluating some other events as well, but the indication from Kindopp is there aren’t any other events from last year that aren't returning in 2025.
As for why attendance was up, Kindopp gave credit to their marketing team which recently won a Paragon Award for Marketing Promotional Achievement.
Kindopp pointed to their team doing a “fantastic job” in setting records for sponsorships.
As for the $75,000 profit Kindopp said “I think we can definitely grow on that for sure.”
“I mean, we've been having some great strategic conversations, I can't get into them at the moment unfortunately, but you know, we're doing the right things moving forward to make sure that we're very well positioned long-term into the future.”
