The 2025 Mid-Atlantic Convention will offer an outstanding line-up of sessions. The schedule of sessions is still being finalized and will be posted in the near future.

Approximately 2,000 attendees are anticipated to participate in the 2025 Mid-Atlantic Convention January 28-30 at the Hershey Lodge in Hershey, PA.  Over 160 companies will be represented in the trade show which typically sells-out, with a waiting list of exhibitors anxious to get into the show.  A series of pre-convention workshops and a farm market bus tour on January 27 attracts several hundred participants.  The various committees have been planning for this year’s convention with the goal of building on the 47-year history of a premier grower educational event.

2025 Convention
January 28-30
Registration Information
See Our 2024 Exhibitors!
2024 Exhibitor List
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Educational Program

The 2025 Educational Program will feature three days of six to nine concurrent sessions covering the following areas: tree fruit, stone fruit, small fruit, vegetables, marketing, and labor/farm management. 

In addition, there will be a full day of practical production programming presented in Spanish for farm and orchard workers.  Expert speakers from Penn State, Rutgers, University of Maryland, and Virginia Tech, along with others from across the country, presented along with selected growers from the Mid-Atlantic region. 

  • Tree Fruit
  • Stone Fruit
  • Small Fruit
  • General Vegetables
  • Sweet Corn
  • Tomatoes
  • Pumpkins
  • High Tunnels
  • Soil Health
  • Tree Fruit
  • Stone Fruit
  • Strawberries/Small Fruit
  • General Vegetables
  • Sweet Corn
  • Tomatoes
  • Pumpkins
  • Potatoes
  • Greenhouse Ornamentals
  • Cut Flowers
  • Urban Agriculture
  • Retail/Wholesale Marketing
  • Labor and Farm Management
  • and more!
  • Potatoes
  • Drones
  • Organic
  • Root Crops
  • Vine Crops
  • Cut Flowers
  • Retail Marketing
  • Labor and Farm Management
  • and more!

Trade Show

The Great American Hall, the Aztec Room, and the Confection Level Lobby at the Hershey Lodge hosts a Trade Show with over 160 exhibitors filling 231 booths. Specialized horticultural equipment, farm market merchandise, and packaging, are all on display along with information on the latest seed varieties, fruit varieties, pesticides and other supplies and services for the commercial grower. The trade show exhibits are open from 8:00 am – 5:30 pm on the first two days, January 28-29. On January 30, they are open at 8:00 am and close at 2:00 pm.  Here’s the list of 2024 Trade Show exhibitors. 2025 Exhibitors will be listed in the near future.

For information on exhibiting at the Trade Show in future years, contact: Maureen Irvin, Convention Coordinator 717-677-4184 or  shap@shaponline.org 

Keystone Speaker

 

2025’s Keynote Speaker will be Joel Salatin, an American farmer, lecturer, and author. 

With a room full of debate trophies from high school and college days, 15 published books, and a thriving multi-generational family farm, he draws on a lifetime of food, farming and fantasy to entertain and inspire audiences around the world. He’s as comfortable moving cows in a pasture as addressing CEOs in a Wall Street business conference. 
 
He co-owns, with his family, Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia. Featured in the New York Times bestseller Omnivore’s Dilemma and award-winning documentary Food Inc., the farm services more than 5,000 families, 50 restaurants, 10 retail outlets, and a farmers’ market with salad bar beef, pigaerator pork, pastured poultry, and forestry products. When he’s not on the road speaking, he’s at home on the farm, keeping the callouses on his hands and dirt under his fingernails, mentoring young people, inspiring visitors, and promoting local, regenerative food and farming systems.

Salatin is the editor of The Stockman Grass Farmer, granddaddy catalyst for the grass farming movement. He writes the “Confessions of a Steward” monthly column for Plain Values magazine, the “Homestead Abundance” column for Homestead Living magazine, and three columns a month for the e-magazine Manward. He also co-hosts a podcast titled BEYOND LABELS with co-author of that book Dr. Sina McCullough.

A frequent guest on radio programs and podcasts targeting preppers, homesteaders, and foodies, Salatin’s practical, can-do solutions tied to passionate soliloquies for sustainability offer everyone food for thought and plans for action.

He also hosts his own podcast with Dr. Sina McCullough called BEYOND LABELS after their book of the same name.

Mixing mischievous humor with hard-hitting information, Salatin both entertains and moves people. Seldom using a power-point and often speaking from an outline scribbled in a yellow legal pad, he depends on theatrics, style, and compelling content to hold attention and defend innovative positions. The rare combination of prophet and practitioner makes him both a must-read and must-hear in a time desperate for integrity leadership and example. 

Joel Salatin photo

Pre-Convention Workshops and Tour

The day before the Convention begins, growers will be able to choose between a farm market bus tour or several different workshops. In 2025 the workshops being offered are Microgreens, a YGA offsite event, Apple Tree Decline Summit 2025, Farm Transition, and PA Pesticide Applicator License Training. The bus tour will be a variety of operations in Lancaster and Chester Counties.

Mid-Atlantic Cider Contest

The annual Mid-Atlantic Cider Contest is conducted during the Convention to determine the best cider in the region.