IS TEXAS TURNING A NEW LEAF?

Austin fires up cannabis, hemp, and CBD expo as industry grows

The expo visits Austin at a time when canna-business is thriving.

Photo courtesy of US Fish & Wildlife

A cannabis, hemp, and CBD expo is rolling into Austin next month, and will feature some mind-blowing speakers and exhibitors.

The traveling Lucky Leaf Expo will hit the Austin Convention Center May 14 and 15, and will include more than 120 exhibitors, 40 speakers, a variety of panels and hemp product demos, and a pre-show Cannabis Crash Course, a comprehensive cannabis business and entrepreneur training session.

Displaying her line of CBD products at the expo will be Angela Simmons, the daughter of Joseph Simmons, aka the great Rev Run of legendary hip-hop group Run DMC. And in the strange-bedfellows realm, Simmons will be spotlighted at the same event as Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who will speak about the evolution of the Texas hemp law. Though a Texas Republican, Miller has long been an advocate for the business of hemp.

“Here in Texas, we’ve been in the hemp business for almost a year and we’re busy building the Texas ‘hempire.’ We’ve issued over 1,150 producer licenses, permitted over 5,000 acres of hemp in the ground, and over 15 million square feet of hemp in greenhouses,” Miller said in a January 19 statement referencing the 2019 passing of House Bill 1325, which made legal the cultivation, possession, and sale of industrial hemp in Texas.

“I still believe hemp offers Texas farmers a great opportunity and I look forward to continuing to improve our program here in the Lone Star State. And with the legislative session underway, I look forward to updating legislators on how this program has been successful despite some very difficult times.”

With cannabis advocates also hoping the Lone Star State will join the growing number of states legalizing recreational marijuana, the Lucky Leaf organizers say the demand for info about how to grow and sustain a canna-business is higher than ever before.

“We have a diverse array of exhibitors in every channel of the CBD hemp industry that specialize in the sale of seeds, CPAs, attorneys, accountants, processors, manufacturers, soft gel companies, to help get you started for your business,” says Chad Sloan of Lucky Leaf Expo.

Indeed, the expo, which will also make stops in Dallas and Houston, visits Austin at a time when Central Texas has experienced some major growth in the CBD landscape — and in the world of cannabis cultivation.

On the heels of the release of local CBD brands like Restart, which sisters Shayda and Sydney Torabi launched in 2018, a wave of CBD products has flooded the market. Even popular Dripping Springs brewery Jester King recently released a hemp balm, made with hemp planted and cultivated on the brewery’s farm.

With multi-state cannabis operator Parallel’s recent announcement it would invest $25 million into a new 63,000-square-foot, state-of-the art cannabis cultivation, production, and retail facility in San Marcos, the likelihood of the industry continuing to mushroom locally — even without Texas legalizing recreational marijuana — is extremely likely.

To learn more about Texas’ venture into the cannabis space and to get tickets to the upcoming expo in Austin, visit Lucky Leaf’s website.

farmer-diaries marijuana education

HIGHER EDUCATION

UT Austin raises automatic admission threshold as applications surge

UT Austin/Facebook

UT is making changes to its automatic admissions threshold.

Texas students aiming to enroll at UT Austin during the fall 2026 semester will face a higher hurdle. During a UT Faculty meeting on September 16, university president Jay Hartzell announced that students will soon need to be in the top five percent of their high school graduating class to be guaranteed admission.

The change comes as enrollment demand continues to rise among Texas students. UT continues to be one of the most coveted universities in the state, spurred by reports like a May Forbes ranking listing the Austin campus and Rice University as the state's two "new Ivies."

Currently, UT grants automatic admission to the top six percent of Texas high school classes, a detour from a 1997 law requiring public universities to admit the top 10 percent of Texas high school graduates. A 2009 rework of the legislation gave UT some latitude, mandating that 75 percent of its first-year classes must be automatically admitted.

Since then, UT has tweaked the threshold based on overwhelming applications while maintaining the 75 percent rule. In 2017, the school changed the threshold from seven percent to six. Applications continue to set records. UT received approximately 73,000 undergraduate solicitations for the fall 2024 semester.

In a statement, A UT spokesperson said the change was needed given the unprecedented demand.

"UT Austin is committed to continuing to provide world-class classroom and research experiences for our students, even while we are facing record demand," the spokesperson wrote. "That demand has been driven both by the success and growth of Texas, and by greater interest in UT among the state's best high-school students. We see no signs that our demand will substantially fall and revising our auto-admit percentage to 5 [percent] will allow us to continue to meet the state's requirement that 75 [percent] of the Texas residents in each freshman class are admitted based on high-school class rank."

More information about automatic admissions is available at utexas.edu.

ut austin colleges