You need to start with the question of who _benefits_ from using your protocol. You think that it's "your competitors", by which I read other software vendors that are providing solutions to the cannabis industry. Hot take: Your solution isn't helping other software vendors, it's making more work for them. Working with a published (and probably over-designed) specification is _always_ going to be more work than just hacking some glue scripts together that solve the specific issue you need to solve right now.

No, the beneficiaries of your standard are the actual farmers, labs, and retailers -- in other words, your competitors' customers. But how do they benefit? Your standard won't make their software _cheaper_, at least not in the short term (see the point above). There are a few situations where these standards help software consumers. First, it can make migrating from one software vendor to another (relatively) easy, as the data can be exported from one system in a format the other can _theoretically_ ingest from. Pro tip: it never works this seamlessly in practice. The other primary usecase is where the consumer wants to incorporate several different software products in a modular fashion. If you don't already have a software ecosystem like this for your industry, this will be a chicken-and-egg problem. You're asking non-technical consumers to demand something from their vendors that doesn't currently provide value to them.

Good luck.