Eric Snodgrass

Eric Snodgrass is a Principal Atmospheric Scientist for Conduit, where he develops predictive, analytical software solutions to manage weather risk for global production agriculture. He provides frequent weather updates that focus on how high-impact weather events influence global agriculture productivity. His current research uses machine learning to better understand field-level weather impacts on yields in the US and to increase confidence in long-range weather prediction. He presents his research as a featured speaker at over 100 conferences annually where he provides logistical guidance and solutions to weather sensitive financial institutions, farmers, commodity traders, and other stakeholders.

Eric was recently awarded the Educator Award in 2023 for Distinguished Service to America’s High Technology Agriculture by the Mid America Croplife Association. Snodgrass is a co-founder of Global Weather and Climate Logistic, LLC and Agrible, Inc which were both acquired by Nutrien Ag Solutions in 2018.

Eric worked at Nutrien from 2019 through 2024 as a Sr. Science Fellow before transitioning to Conduit. From 2006-2019, Eric was the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he taught over 20,000 students across a wide range of course work in Atmospheric Science. He won many prestigious teaching awards at the University of Illinois including College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Teaching Excellence award, the Campus Teaching Excellence Award and the Campus Teaching Excellent Award in Online and Distance Education. Eric Snodgrass

Dinner Keynote Presentation

Weather risk in production agriculture is ubiquitous and the successful execution of a crop plan requires accurate weather forecasting and analysis. We plan our operations based on weather averages and our experiences over recent growing seasons, but each year presents a new set of weather challenges. In this talk we will focus on how to use the abundance of weather data to stay ahead to disruptive weather events. We will talk about the limits of predictability for weather events and learn about the resources available to monitor changes in the longer-range forecasts. We will talk about disruptive technologies in predictive analytics – like Artificial Intelligence. We will review the major lessons from the 2024 growing season and talk about the high impact events like widespread hail damage, tornadoes, derechos, the late summer/early fall Midwest Drought, and the hurricane season. We will talk about the big seasonal drivers like El Niño and La Niña discuss the outlook for the next 3-9 months. We will finish with a discussion about the 2024-25 growing season in South America, which competes directly with major US commodity crops.