A young woman from Turner Valley was in attendance at the recent National Beef Conference held in Calgary.

Emily Ritchie was a part of the organizing committee and says as a first-time event it was a great success.

"We figured that we sold 630 full delegate registrations and then along with that a few day registrations and different registrations for the meals we had about 750 people through the doors over the course of the week," Ritchie says.

She says there was some very timely  information for the delegates to savour.

"Up until this point a lot of farmers and ranchers have just gone along doing their own thing not really worrying about what the general public thinks about how their operations go but now people are asking a lot more questions about where their food comes from, which I think is great because it's keeping farmers and ranchers more accountable," she says. "But at the same time it's kind of spurring producers to get ahead of that curve and kind of putting that information out there before people are having to demand it from them."

She  grew up on a ranching operation with cow-calf pairs and also works for a cow-calf marketing company called Cows In Control and won the Young Speakers On Agriculture contest held at the Calgary Stampede.