The Propane Technology Forum is underway here in Austin, TX. About 100 propane industry experts are on hand sharing ideas about the future of liquid petroleum gas. Industry leaders from across the U.S. are collaborating with other international experts from Mexico and France, focusing on the future of propane growth, marketing and innovation. It’s early in the day, but the morning’s presentations have already touched on an array of uses for propane gas including propane as a fuel source for dehumidifiers and motor vehicles and as an application tool for emissions control and pollution prevention.
I’ll be interviewing several of these industry leaders one-on-one during our breaks to get a better understanding of where the use of propane gas is headed.
Here’s a picture of our cohort at the 
Okay. Here’s our first in class post and this is the cohort, as Owen Roberts calls it.
It’s a brisk but sunny and beautiful morning here at the University of Guelph.
BASF is into just about everything, including wine. We toured the compnay’s Weinfachgeschaft, which handles about a million bottles of wine a year – about 2,000 different labels. Most are German wines, but they also handle a nice selection from around Europe and some other countries as well. BASF even has its own private label wines. 
So, this was part of the reason I ended up quite ill last night – a glorious wine tasting with our host. It was great, but combined with jet lag, lack of sleep, lack of food, and just general exhaustion it was not so good for my system. We started out with a wonderful sparkling wine toast and followed up with a selection of eight different wines, both white and red, from the Palatinate region here in Germany, as well as one each from Portugal, Italy, Spain and France. 
Hello from Germany. I am here in a cute little hotel in Speyer, feeling much better today after feeling pretty horrible last night. A long, delayed trip got me here just as everyone was ready to leave on the first leg of BASF visit, so I barely had time to change before heading out to see the BASF welcome center and do a bus tour around the plant, which is huge.
In the welcome center they have an interactive map of the plant site which allows you to see how big it is in relation to some of the world’s major cities, which was quite interesting – needless to say, it compares pretty favorabily. We could have spent hours wandering through the welcome center, but we really only had maybe a half hour. There is so much to see and so many interactive exhibits and videos. The new welcome center was just opened this year and already they have had 20,000 visitors! They get about 50,000 visitors normally to the site each year, mostly customers of BASF. The welcome center is open to the public.
Everything you wanted to know about propane will be available here on Agwired.com throughout the day tomorrow. I flew into Austin, TX today to cover tomorrow’s 
The Monsanto World Headquarters is now 40,000 square feet bigger. The global provider of technology-based solutions and agricultural products has completed construction of a 
It’s a travel day for me and a better one than Cindy had yesterday I hope. She’s on her way (maybe there?) to Germany but had flight cancellations and delays that were hard to believe and added many hours to her trip.