National Hemp Conference 2022

The third national Australian Industrial Hemp Conference occurred in late March 2022 in Launceston, following on from Geelong in 2018 and Fremantle in 2020, with several hundred delegates in attendance. 

The THA are very grateful to AIHC founder Robert Bell for giving our state the opportunity to host this biennial event.  Considering the huge impact of COVID restricting many domestic and international attendees from freely travelling, this was a good number, with attendees coming from every state in Australia and also from Canada, Poland, the USA, the Netherlands, Germany and New Zealand.

An additional hundred local attendees, including around forty of our Grower Members, came to the ‘Things of Hemp’ event. This very fun gathering saw guests tasting a range of hemp food and drinks including beer, rum, gin, and ice cream while enjoying live music from local performers and a special guest appearance by hemp farmer and country music star James Blundell and his son Briar, who played a custom-built electric guitar and amp made from hemp composite, the only one of its kind in the country.

The THA is especially grateful to Dr Stuart Gordon from the CSIRO for the work he put into the conference program and to the Tasmanian State Government for the vital support the AIHC received via Business Events Tasmania. In the uncertainty presented by the pandemic, this funding enabled the first national conference to be held in Tasmania since our borders were closed in early 2020.

By any measure, the conference was a great success, with fantastic media exposure for our industry, and an opportunity to showcase how far we have come with industry development here in Tasmania. Proceedings of the AIHC 2022 from the fifty presentations on topics ranging from new varieties, industrial hemp for forage through to the use of industrial hemp for human health will be available from the AgriFutures Australia website at the end of May 2022.