CropLife Retail Week: The 500th Episode!
October 25, 2024 Eric Sfiligoj and Lara Sowinski look back at 9.5 years’ worth of CropLife Retail Week videos.
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*Below is a partial and edited transcript:
Eric Sfiligoj: Hello everyone. Welcome to a special edition of CropLife Retail Week. I’m Eric Sfiligoj, your host, along with co-host Lara Sowinski. Lara, how are you doing?
Lara Sowinksi: I’m doing well. Thank you. What are all those balloons behind your head there?
ES: Well, I’m glad you asked, because, again, you know, in society, they celebrate 500 whatever in baseball, for example. 28 players throughout the history of baseball have hit 500 homeruns or more, including greats like Barry Bonds and Hank Aaron. And of course, every year in Indianapolis, if you are faster at going around a track and succeeding in getting that 500 mile mark in, you win the Indianapolis 500. And I know the biggest superhero in the world, Superman, who was introduced back in 1938, celebrated his 500th issue of Action Comics in October of 1979.
So I’m here to report today if you haven’t already guessed that CropLife Retail Week is celebrating this week, its 500th episode.
LS: That’s wonderful. That’s pretty cool.
ES: I know it is. It is amazing. And then I give all the props in the world to our former co-host Paul Schrimpf because, back in 2014, he got together with me and said, “hey, you know, why don’t we do a weekly video where you talk about the news of the week and inform everybody what’s going on in the retail and agricultural worlds in little a little video clip” and I’m like, and if you’re wondering how I was petrified at the time, we have a couple of clips of that first show back in 2014, nine and a half years ago, a couple of outtakes. And then we’re also going to have a couple other tidbits in there with you and Paul talking at one event, my son, who created a persona called Box Person back when he was still much, much younger than he is much taller than me now.
But you’ll see in the video clip he was small. And then the couple other surprises. So hope you enjoy these clips for the next minute or two.
First Retail Week: This is Paul Schrimpf. I am executive editor of CropLife magazine here with Eric Sfiligoj, the editor. CropLife magazine, and we’re bringing you a new program called CropLife Retail Week.
The key issues the retailers will be facing. But one thing I found was very interesting. There was a panel discussion there featuring millennials. It felt like Groundhog Day all over, all over again. Cavaliers garb on Billy Boy. There’s still too many that comes back. And he still has the same number of consonants r, y, o. I would have gotten bigger, but the bigger ones came with their your own flock of sheep, which I thought was just overkill.
It’s something like Scarlet Holiday eat too much. You get too much. She gets boy. Oh visions of missed deadlines danced in their head. Find out what my friends at Illinois are talking about in the ag market. Lose the bucks person next to me. Okay. Go ahead. Hey. Looks like. Yeah. All right, well, okay, I’m going to go with a.
No, no. I’m sorry. Let me see that 19%. It’s not see either. No. The great thing.
ES: So that’s a little bit of the history of 500 episodes of CropLife Retail Week. I know, Lara, you saw that first one back in 14. I had darker hair and I looked a lot younger, although scared. But, you know, and I no longer have that shirt.
I think that shirt wore out long ago, but. And of course, Paul is not here anymore. You are now the person that I generally do these videos with. And I’ve been having a blast for all 500 episodes, and I hope for the time that you’ve been here, you’ve had as much fun. Yeah. It’s really it’s cool.
LS: Honestly, congratulations to you and Paul for, chalking up. You know, I had a little small part in reaching the 500 milestone, but, Great idea. Love it. I think, a testament to kind of how fun it is. And, you know, good little way to spend your Saturday morning after. But, No, it’s great, it’s great.
ES: I it’s hard to believe 500. I knew, I knew it was coming, based on. Because again, every, every video we have a numbers stamp on it. So it’s been counting up for me and I’m like, wow, we’re getting close. We’re getting close. And I remember over the summertime I thought, yeah, sometime when I think October we’re going to hit 500 episodes, so we’ll have to do something.
So here we are. So it’s great. Yeah. So hey, anyhow, before we get to the end of our program and your favorite segment, which I’m going to continue to do, I wanted to mention, of course, we mentioned a few videos ago, CropLife Iron, one of our publications right now is accepting nominations for its product of the year competition.
Again, every year for the last dozen years or so, we’ve handed out a trophy to the product that the readers and viewers of CropLife Iron view as the best product they’ve seen for this calendar year. And I’ve got to say that, our, our voting competition is kind of going like the national voting, competition is expected to go at the moment.
We’ve had voting going on for a couple of weeks, and we have a tie well, at the top between two of the products in the the competition among the five. So I don’t want to give out two trophies. So, folks, I’m begging you, please vote for your favorite product and I’ll go over the products again. The five nominees are the See and Spray premium for Hagie sprayers from John Deere, the Amazon ZG BTS spreader, the Salford SS400+ spreader, the New Leader NL 720 spreader or the Doyle ET electric tenders.
So those are the five nominees. And as I said we’ve got two at the top tied at the moment. And I’ll say the product that’s in third place at the moment it’s only behind by about 15 votes. So get out there. We’ll take votes through November 1st. The link should be on the screen. So please, if you could help me break the tie, we don’t want to tie.
Yeah. Get those votes in and then we’ll send the sticker I voted for crop life. Right. So I’m looking. That’d be a great idea. We’ll have to consider that for next year. So a little giveaway idea. So. So, hey, Miss Lara, then, since we’ve now celebrated, let’s go back to, like, our regularly scheduled program, and we will go to your favorite segment of the show.
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