Early-bird registration ends next Monday for the June 24-25 conference, Transition to a Bioeconomy: Risks, Infrastructure and Industry Evolution. Registration is $225 until June 9, when the fee increases to $250.
This conference is the second of four examining how the evolution of the bioeconomy is impacting agriculture, energy systems, suppliers, consumers and the global economy. This series is a collaboration of Farm Foundation, USDA’s Office of Energy Policy and New Uses, USDA’s Economic Research Service, and the Energy Biosciences Institute. The Institute is a 10-year research collaboration of the University of California-Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Illinois and BP.
The program for the June conference, which will be at the Doubletree Marina Hotel, Berkeley, Calif., will address new market relationships of ethanol, corn and gasoline; how biofuels are impacting other segments of the market; and the bioeconomy’s impacts at the farm level. Other sessions will address risks of the bioeconomy; legal, financial, transportation and public policy infrastructure issues; and the challenges and opportunities of the next decade in research, education, business and finance.
“We’re drawing expertise from industry leaders, government officials and academia. It is a unique opportunity for those at the front lines of the biofuels industry to discuss timely, critical issues with peers and academics doing cutting-edge research on risk and infrastructure issues,”
says Farm Foundation Vice President Steve Halbrook. “This conference is an opportunity to broaden understanding of how those new relationships and needs are developing and how they might influence business strategies and public policy development.”
Conference program details are available on the Web at www.farmfoundation.org. A special conference sleeping room rate is available at the Doubletree Marina for reservations made by June 11. Also posted on the Web are presentations from the first conference in the series, which addressed the integration of agricultural and energy systems.
Scheduled for Oct. 15-16, in St. Louis, the third conference in the series will address environmental and economic development impacts. The last conference in the series, slated for early 2009, will focus on the implications of a global bioeconomy.
Farm Foundation has been a catalyst on bioenergy issues since June 2004, when it led the conference Agriculture as a Consumer and Producer of Energy. For information on this and the other energy conferences Farm Foundation has presented—Biofuels, Food and Feed Tradeoffs, Energy in Agriculture: Managing the Risk, Energy from Agriculture: New Technologies, Innovations and Success Stories—visit the Farm Foundation Web site, www.farmfoundation.org.
Farm Foundation works as a catalyst, bringing stakeholders of all ideologies together to examine economic and public policy issues impacting agriculture, the food system and rural communities. Farm Foundation does not lobby or advocate. Its primary product is comprehensive, objective information on economic and policy issues.
For more information, contact:
Steve Halbrook, Vice President (630) 571-9393, steve@farmfoundation.org
Mary Thompson, Director of Communications, (630) 571-9393, mary@farmfoundation.org