WILMINGTON — “Innovations in Agriculture” will be the focus for the Clinton County Farm Bureau’s upcoming annual meeting.

The guest speakers will be from BrightFarms and from Indigo Ag. BrightFarms uses hydroponic systems to grow produce in a soil-less environment, and delivers the fresh produce to area supermarkets shortly after it’s harvested. Indigo Ag uses microbial treatments to optimize plant health.

The meeting will be held Wednesday, Aug. 22 at the Expo Hall on the Clinton County Fairgrounds. Dinner will begin at 6 p.m. and tickets are $10.

“The evening will be filled with good food, voting on policy and board members, and recognizing the scholarship winner’s accomplishments,” stated a Farm Bureau news release.

Please RSVP by Aug. 13. To make a reservation, call the Clinton County Farm Bureau office at 937-382-4407 or email: [email protected] .

BrightFarms owns and operates indoor, hydroponic greenhouses that individually produce more than 800,000 pounds of locally grown salad greens and herbs. The company has built a large climate-controlled greenhouse for year-round farming off Davids Drive on Wilmington’s east end.

The target markets for the Wilmington greenhouse greens will be Cincinnati, Dayton and Columbus retailers.

Indigo’s seed treatments are based on the microbes that have evolved in conjunction with plants over millions of years to optimize their health and maximize their productivity, states the Indigo Ag website.

Microbes are organisms so tiny that millions of them can fit onto the head of a pin. They help sustain life in all its forms, added the website.

Like human microbes, plant microbes can be impacted by their environment including heat and drought, chemicals such as pesticides, and soil conditions.

Indigo started with the hypothesis that microbes living inside the plant are vital to their health.

“We found that some of these important microbes are being reduced by modern agricultural practices,” stated the company website.

Indigo has assembled a database of genomic information from these microbes.

“We apply algorithms and machine learning to this database to predict which microbes are most beneficial to the plant’s health, applying these specially selected microbes to crops in the form of a seed coating.

“The resulting seed treatments complement a plant’s natural processes to improve health and development across each phase of life while boosting crop yields,” according to the Indigo website.