The Nutritionist Series
Since 2015 AMTS has been co-hosting an educational webinar series called The Nutritionist. The idea can from Marcelo Hentz Ramos, our Brazilian Distributor and the Director of 3rLab in Brazil. He talked it over with Tom on one of Tom’s trips to Brazil and Tom returned and passed the task on to Mariann. Marcelo had been doing webinars with producers in Brazil and thought a multi-language, globally focused series would have real appeal. Marcelo had a list of tentative speakers and topics that we needed to schedule and set-up. We got Paula Turiello, a nutritionist and educator in Argentina, to host in Spanish. The founders of AMTS have a real educational bent and these noncommercial webinar fit with their business model. Tom spent time in extension before getting his PhD and Caroline and Vijay were both with Cornell working on the model. Our first year went surprisingly well– we learned fast and had very good feedback.
Expanding Markets
In subsequent years we gained more co-hosts, now routinely translating into Mandarin and having delivery from Italy. We not only reach a global audience with each live and recorded webinar but have made the effort to bring in speakers outside of the US for voices not as often heard. To make things easier on the people joining us in the Eastern Hemisphere, we made the decision to offer the webinar at two times on webinar day. This allowed more people to participate in the question period without needing to stay up all night. In 2018 we ran an abbreviated Beef Nutritionist series focused on feeding beef cattle.
Archived presentations
We also made a push recently to get all the past webinars onto our website as a recording. Now people can catch up up all the past webinar presentation in multiple ways. They can watch online through the AMTS webinar page. This page often contains additional information like presentation pdfs and links to referenced papers. The webinars can also be downloaded by going to the AMTS vimeo page and choosing to download. A couple of us in the office are dedicated podcast listeners. We thought our customers likely would appreciate the opportunity to do some passive listening whilst driving or doing mindless tasks. To that effect we created mp3 files from the audio of the webinars. You miss out on the graphics, but many people appreciate it.
Coming in 2019
We will launch our fifth year in February when Rick Grant will speak on current research being done at the Miner Institute in Chazy and talk about new fiber information. We will follow with a few talks focused on calves and calf feeding. Mike VanAmburgh will talk about new research in calves and will team up with Akira Saito the following month to discuss robots in calves. Our talks the rest of the month will cover more on heifers, optimizing diets, fatty acid balancing, emissions, and finishing up with pastures and grazing information. We will, again, offer the talks twice on webinar day; morning and night to permit better listening times around the globe.
So, check them out and return on 14 February for the next presentation.