The American Seed Trade Association (ASTA) hosts four major events every year. Three of the four are very heavily focused on business-to-business networking: the Forage, Turf and Conservation Conference (Nov. 1 in Kansas City, MO), the Field Crop Seed Convention (Dec. 5-8 in Orlando, FL), and the Vegetable and Flower Seed Conference (Jan 26-30, 2024, in Monterey, CA).
The fourth event — ASTA’s annual Leadership Summit — is an entirely different type of event. Held in mid to late June each year (it’ll be June 15-19 in 2024) in Nashville, TN, the Leadership Summit suits all parts of the seed business.
The Summit has been restructured and reformatted significantly over the past couple years, says ASTA’s Jennifer Crouse, Senior Director of Meetings and Services.
“What we’re doing is responding to those post-pandemic after-effects on events, where you don’t want to make the effort to come to something that you could have watched online,” she says. “In-person experiences need to be an experience that you can’t get any other way. What we’ve done in the past two years with the Leadership Summit is to make it a lot more interactive in nature.”
The entire goal of the Summit is to allow opportunities for meaningful dialogue about leadership across the seed value chain.
“[The event now facilitates opportunities] to take your time and sit down and talk with other people in the industry about leadership development of your team and about the future of the seed industry. The event brings all different career levels of people together at the same table to co-create that future together,” says Crouse.
Crouse encourages all parts of the seed industry to make time for their sector-specific networking conference, but also to make plans to attend the seed industry-wide Leadership Summit too.
The Leadership Summit, she says, “is like a leadership development workshop that your company would otherwise have to organize for yourselves, but ASTA is doing it for you.”
Receive a 10% discount code towards registering for the Leadership Summit when you register for any of ASTA’s main networking events:
- the Forage, Turf and Conservation Conference, held Nov. 1, 2023 in Kansas City, MO (held in conjunction with the Western Seed Association’s annual meeting in Kansas City Oct 30 to Nov 1) *Note that sorghum topics have been moved to the Forage Turf and Conservation Seed Conference.
- the Field Crop Seed Convention, coming up December 5-8 in Orlando, Florida.
- the Vegetable and Flower Seed Conference, scheduled for January 26 to 30, 2024 in Monterey, California.
