MJBizCon and The #1 U.S. Market Leader in Cultivation
Claims, awards, and concepts like “the best” or “#1” make most people in our organization roll their eyes. As they should. Motivation for doing anything whether it be farming, raising kids, or breeding for diverse efficacious compounds, has to be rooted in far more than just ego if it’s to sustain and provide meaning.
With that said, we also find it important to celebrate authentic and meaningful recognition.
MJBizCon, created by the editors of Marijuana Business Daily, is the largest gathering of cannabis business professionals in the world and a leading authority on cannabis markets in the U.S. Their goal is to provide benefit and support to every part of the cannabis community.
Over the course of 2019, they created several award categories like U.S. Market Leader, Regional & Hemp Game Changer, Industry & Community Impact, with winners to be announced at the annual conference. Finalists and winners were selected through a three-step process:
Marijuana Business Daily reporters, staff, and the public make categorical nominations.
An internal MBD committee reviews nominations, and selects finalists.
An independent board of judges review finalists and select the winners in each category.
Earlier this year we were surprised to learn that we had been selected as an awards finalists for U.S. Market Leader in Cultivation along with trade leaders and giants Columbia Care, EcoGen Laboratories, and Cresco Labs.
We were surprised for a number of reasons, the main one being that we're a small fraction of the size of the other finalists. A small family farm (25 FTE) in Southwestern Oregon being considered the U.S. market leader in the United States for cannabis/hemp cultivation? We laughed at the idea. And we loved it.
We had almost zero expectation we’d win. On the way to the awards ceremony last week in Las Vegas, our CEO, Mason, gave it a 0.1% shot.
Then we won. We've been named the U.S. Market Leader in cultivation. It's a bit surreal, unbelievable, and exciting. But we're tempered by the fact that such accolades are imperfect and fleeting and that we can think of many other farms more deserving of such an award.
We celebrate this distinction for the message it sends: you don’t have to be big to be the best. That values, intention, innovation, and most importantly, ethics, are rewarded. We'll be sharing more in the coming months on what ethical cannabis means to us and how it can, and hopefully will, continue to manifest in the hemp and cannabis trades (whether it be in the form of a small scrappy startup or a $100M multi-state operator).
At the conference
Our Co-Founder Nathan Howard, Director of Education Anna Symonds, and CEO Mason Walker traveled to Las Vegas in mid December to attend MJBizCon, the world's largest cannabis industry event. More than 31,000 people attended daily, and the expo floor contained 1,300 booths. It was a wild spectacle. We went for three reasons:
To support our partners at Vibrant Hemp Cultures. We've licensed seven cultivars to the team at Vibrant, working to make the fruits of our breeding program labor available to hemp farmers across the country in 2020.
To attend the awards gala, in which East Fork was nominated for a major award.
To gain new market insights, make new connections, and learn from leaders in the cannabis community.
It was a surprisingly successful trip. The response to our cultivars at the Vibrant booth was very positive. We brought trimmed flower from all seven of the cultivars that will be available in tissue culture form via Vibrant Hemp Cultures and a common response from visitors to our booth, after looking at and smelling the flowers, was "This isn't hemp. This is marijuana. Right?" It was fun watching people as their preconceived notions of what "hemp" is were upended.
Of course, as we mentioned above, we were named U.S. Market Leader in the Cultivation category at the official awards event, a wild and welcome surprise.
We spoke with hundreds of people and visited dozens of booths, soaking up as much as we could about the current state of the cannabis trade — information we'll use to help better inform our work. And lastly, we connected with dozens of other Oregonians that were also attending the conference. The Oregon delegation was extremely strong and, after many hours of conversations with cannabis and hemp leaders from around the country and world, our belief that Oregon is leading in the realm of ethical, sustainable, and conscious cannabis was reinforced.
Read more about the MJBizCon awards on Marijuana Business Daily.
