Jacqueline Collins
Audio By Carbonatix
The NoCo Hemp Expo, one of North America’s largest and longest-running hemp conferences, quietly came to an end last year, but the organizer plans on bringing back a new trade show focused on the plant in 2026.
Founded in 2014 by longtime music promoter Morris Beegle, the NoCo Hemp Expo was first held in Loveland but outgrew its event space in the wake of recreational cannabis legalization and the subsequent hemp and CBD market explosions. The spring trade show moved on to the now-closed Crowne Plaza convention space in north Aurora, the National Western Complex in Denver and the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center, in that order, attracting thousands of attendees per day.
The NoCo Hemp Expo then went SoCo in 2023, when it was held at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. As the hemp industry retracted, however, Beegle prepared for smaller expos,and moved the NoCo show to Estes Park, where it ran in 2024 and 2025. After keeping the NoCo Hemp Expo going for eleven years, Beegle says he knew it was time to retire the conference after the 2025 run in Estes Park.
“Estes was great, and I was going to do a NoCo number twelve, but the industry has changed too much. We kind of needed to reassess where things were at, and start a brand-new program,” Beegle says. “Everything has just changed dramatically, from where things were before the pandemic to where things were after.”
Hemp got a hot start in Colorado after the state legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, and it soared even higher shortly after Congress federally legalized industrial hemp in 2018. The hemp industry quickly proved to be dependent on gray-area cannabinoids like CBD and Delta-8 THC, however, and both have heavily fluctuated in pricing and federal legality in recent years, with Congress passing a bill that would explicitly prohibit hemp-derived THC product sales in the U.S. in 2027.
In 2019, there were around 2,300 registered hemp growers in Colorado, according to national industry report. According to the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s most recent list, there are currently fewer than 130 registered hemp farmers in the state.
Beegle has never denounced cannabinoids or the role they can play in the legal cannabis space, but he always stressed the NoCo Hemp Expo was more about the industrial uses of hemp, such as fiber, food and building materials, even while allowing cannabinoid companies and panel discussions space at the expo. Still, the expo’s peak attendance undoubtedly coincided with those boons.
Finding a new venue on the fly wasn’t foreign for the NoCo Hemp Expo, which had to go virtual in 2020 and operate under restrictions at Western Complex in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beegle also had to secure a new host in 2022 after his plan return to the Crowne Plaza was canceled by an influx of Afghan refugees who were assigned to stay there in the wake of the United States military pullout. And even when a venue was secured, there could still be obstacles from outside, like in 2015, when a pot-hating Larimer County sheriff tried (and failed) to shut down the expo.
With a more narrow focus on his upcoming hemp conference Beegle is excited to have more focus on all the cool things hemp can do outside of cannabinoid production, from ropes and soap to building homes.
“That’s why I got into the space in the first place: the t-shirts, food, bioplastics. Then the CBD products came,” he says. “NoCo was always positioned to be on the non-intoxicating side until, all of a sudden, we’ve got [hemp-derived] intoxicates thanks to the FDA not doing what it was instructed to do. …It became tough. This big rise in intoxicating hemp side of things disrupted the process.”
New Hemp Trade Show Coming in March
Beegle’s next hemp production, the Industrial Hemp International Conference & Trade Show, will run from March 25 through March 27 at the Hyatt Regency Aurora-Denver Conference Center.
The NoCo Hemp Expo was known for an expansive vendor hall and days of workshops and discussions for industrial hemp industry members, while keynote speakers often included Governor Jared Polis and other influential politicians. Beegle says Industrial Hemp International will be a “new platform” with a tighter focus on business-to-business operations, and less on an expansive vendor hall — although there will still be business tables and vendors, he notes.
Almost seventy speakers are expected to appear at Industrial Hemp International, including longtime cannabis attorney Brian Vicente, author Doug Fine, CBD activist Paige Figi and state Senator Julie Gonzales.
“It’s a smaller vendor exhibition, with mostly tables, not booths. The programming will be similar to NoCo’s, in that it’s the most relevant information out there pertinent to policy and new market trends,” Beegle details. “The goal with this isn’t to be a huge show, but a very refined and focused show.”
And focus is just what the hemp industry needs right now, according to Beegle.
“What is hemp in Colorado? That is a good question. My answer is that I do not know. But I would like Colorado hemp to be all that I’ve said it can be: a crop that can become food, fiber, medicine, housing and clothing,” he says. “Hemp in Colorado is very confused.”
