A study found that industry innovation drops 15% without conferences, obviously observed during Covid. That’s one reason U.S. hemp acres crashed 95% in 5 years, no industry-specific conferences safe for young women and old men, especially technical ones.
Demanding we listen to a pot lawyer, goat herder, movie star valet, and music promoter new to hemp didn’t help. Meanwhile, those who built the industry were exiled and forgotten despite still being active in the industry and willing to teach.
The last great hemp conferences were in the ’90s, Bioresource Hemp attached to BioFach, the organic trade fair in Germany. Great content by the world’s leading experts at the time, thousands of attendees from around the world, plus the possibility of attracting wholesale buyers attending the other fair combined with a booth inside the BioFach itself. It all went a long way towards legitimizing commercial hemp trade globally. For a hemp conference to be successful in the US it will need to be attached to a greater trade show, such as ExpoWest or an Ag or other synergistic event.
On the hemp side, a video expo was the opportunity to make lemonade from lemons by finally incorporating those industry experts who don’t need to travel to promote themselves anymore, those of us who did a lot in hemp but are now retired. The ones we need to hear from don’t want to pay to teach us out of their own pocket, nor should they; the hemp expos pay speakers nothing.
Video was the perfect chance to get around that reasonable obstacle, to hear from those in Malaysia, or Italy, or Amsterdam, or Spain, or Ukraine, or Poland, or Thailand, or Australia, or France, or Estonia, or China, or Sweden, or New Zealand, or Mexico. Instead, they let an opportunity to do things they otherwise couldn’t go to waste.
The main advantage of narrow-interest expos is the meeting of colleagues, such as a conference or congress. Here Prof. Slingerland, author of “Drunk,” discusses the effect not having them has on industry innovation and collaboration. 51 seconds.