The 2024 Emerald Cup, the Northern California sun-grown cannabis celebration now in its 20th year, has been pushed from May until August.
“Due to a huge response, the 20th Anniversary of the Emerald Cup is expanding its programming to create the best attendee experience ever and postponing our Festival and Awards show from May 4th and 5th to the weekend of Aug 17th and 18th 2024,” organizers wrote in an email announcing the change.
Tim Blake, the Emerald Cup’s founder and co-producer, did not immediately respond to an MJBizDaily request for comment.
Once a small convocation of like-minded Emerald Triangle outlaw growers, the Emerald Cup steadily grew in size and profile during the legalization era to a multiple day “cannabis cup.”
Recent years also saw other shifts:
- Geographical: The event was moved from Northern California to Los Angeles in an attempt to appeal to marijuana consumers rather than mercurial and idiosyncratic growers from the isolated hills of Humboldt and Mendocino counties.
- Timing: The event was moved from the post-harvest December holiday season to springtime.
But the legal era has hit the small independent outdoor farmer hard, with oversupply, a lack of retail and direct sales opportunities as well as wildfires and regulatory burdens leaving crops unsold and farms closing.
And those struggles extended to Emerald Cup.
Last year, organizers canceled the annual December event, which had been rebranded as the Harvest Ball Festival and drew 13,000 attendees to the Sonoma County fairgrounds in Santa Rosa, California, the past few years.
