The 2020 Soil Management and Land Valuation Conference has been canceled for the year due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The 93rd Soil Management and Land Valuation Conference was originally scheduled for May; however, it was later postponed until August and has now been cancelled altogether. This marks the first cancellation of this event since World War II.
“We had hoped a postponement would allow us to continue with the traditional conference at some point this year,” said Wendong Zhang. “But because of ongoing uncertainties and social distancing requirements posed by the pandemic, we’ve decided against it,” he said. Zhang is an assistant professor of economics at Iowa State and has been in charge of the SMLV conference since 2016.
“However, one conference tradition was not broken,” Zhang said. “Since the 1960s we’ve surveyed attendees about land value trends and crop prices. This year we sent the survey electronically and got a similar response rate to previous years.” Zhang said a detailed analysis of survey results will be available in a forthcoming Ag Decision Maker newsletter in July.