A farm show is not the same as a state fair. No midway rides. No demolition derby. No grandstand entertainment. So what’s the draw?
My husband and I don’t farm. We don’t even raise backyard chickens. Still, in July we drove 160 miles round trip to attend Wisconsin’s 2026 Farm Technology Days. Here’s why.
The water test. Farm Tech wasn’t even on my radar until I saw a social media post from Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources. It said private well owners could bring one cup of well water in a clean container to the DNR tent for a free nitrate screening, with results available in minutes. When we get test kits from our county health department, the Bacteria and Nitrate test kits are $25 apiece. Free sounded awesome.
So I looked at the show site and studied the schedule of events. There were several that caught my eye, but I only had to mention one to convince Bill to come with me. My husband has been a volunteer firefighter in our rural area for 40 years come November. He jumped at the chance to see a confined space rescue demonstration.
The volunteers. It takes years of planning and preparation to pull off a farm show, and an army of volunteers. It’s not just a farm that hosts it; it’s a community. And the volunteers are not all farmers. Many belong to local civic and charitable organizations that receive donations based on the number of hours of volunteer labor provided by the organization.
Volunteers help set up the show, maintain the grounds, and help visitors navigate the event – from parking and shuttles to admissions, operating special accommodations like golf cart transports, and manning information kiosks. When you’ve lived in a rural area for a long time, the volunteers in another community can seem as familiar as if they were your own neighbors.
Those volunteers give the show a homecoming vibe.
About that vibe. Expect it to be family- friendly. As in young families with strollers and wagons to shade their youngest members at nap time. Young men and women in plaid pearl-snap shirts and straw hats who say “Excuse me, ma’am” when you accidentally bump them. Amish and Mennonite families in plain dress. There was a refreshing absence of the coarse language and behavior that sometimes takes the fun out of a fair when you leave the livestock pavilions for the midway.
Plenty to see and do. Before we even got to the gate, Bill and I were tempted to linger at a demonstration of mowing hay with a team of horses. But we had planned a modest agenda for our one day at the show (the forecast warned of high temps and heavy smoke from wildfires in the Boundary Waters). To get to the manure pit rescue demo on time, we needed to make a beeline to the shuttle area and board the tractor-drawn wagon that would transport us from the parking area to the admissions gate. Upon entry to the grounds, we followed our map to the FRESH tent.
Rural volunteer firefighters who might have no farming experience must know how to safely enter a methane-filled confined space to rescue someone in a manure pit. (Photo by Donna Kallner / The Daily Yonder)
FRESH stands for Farm Rescue Education, Safety, and Health, a collaboration between the National Farm Medicine Center, the National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety, the Pittsville Fire Department, and Marshfield Clinic. Inside the tent, we found a wealth of information useful to rural residents, whether or not they farm.
In my youth, at a farm show, you could collect enough pencils and rulers to last the school year. Today’s swag is way cooler. For example, we picked up a tick collection kit designed to enlist citizen scientists in a project that will help identify what kinds of ticks are present in our area and whether they’re likely to carry diseases.
In that same tent, we picked up a poster on what information to share with a 911 dispatcher in case of emergency. We also could have had our blood pressures checked, screened for skin cancer, learned about adaptive devices for farmers with disabilities, or found a quiet, private place to nurse an infant.
The demos. Just outside the FRESH tent, we found the rescue demonstration area. The manure pit rescue simulator was an enclosed trailer with plexiglass windows on both sides. A narrator explained the dangers of methane gas in a confined area as volunteer firefighters demonstrated how they would enter that space safely to extricate adult and child “victims”. Even a short demo like that is an effective tool for building safety awareness among rural volunteer firefighters (possibly with zero farm experience) who might someday be called to a confined space rescue. Thank you to the men and women who donned full firefighter PPE, air tanks, and breathing apparatus in that oppressive heat to help educate the public.
The tractor rollover scenario demonstration showed how firefighters might stabilize and lift a tractor to free someone pinned beneath it. The tractor was of a size and vintage popular with people who might putter on rural property but don’t farm – people less likely than farm kids to get training on how to avoid a rollover.
We didn’t stay long enough to see the grain bin rescue demo. But we did take part in a brief Stop The Bleed demo. Uncontrolled bleeding, a major cause of preventable deaths, is of particular concern in rural areas. A trauma patient can bleed out in three to five minutes – well before EMS may reach the scene. But with about an hour of training, bystanders may be able to recognize a life-threatening hemorrhage and control it until emergency responders can arrive.
In the FRESH tent, showgoers could get blood pressures checked and skin cancer screenings, learn about farm safety, and become part of a citizen science tick collection effort. (Photo by Donna Kallner / The Daily Yonder)
The drones. After reading this in the Daily Yonder last fall, I was particularly interested in seeing a demonstration of agricultural drone capabilities. The craft we saw was roughly the size of a riding lawnmower but looked more like a Star Wars X-wing fighter. For the demo, it carried water to show spray applications, including variable droplet size. The crowd (including two family groups in plain dress) asked great questions about payload capacity, FAA regulations and licensing, learning curves, cost/benefit ratios, and more.
What most surprised me was this: The operator talked about advantages to smaller farm operations. Contract applicators using conventional spray methods, for example, are inclined to go first to the largest operations with the biggest fields. By the time they complete those jobs, jobs at the smaller operations further down the financial incentive list may have missed a window for most effective application. But an investment in drone technology (financial and educational) can give a smaller operator greater control and responsiveness to field and weather conditions.
At that demo there were people whose questions sounded like they were serious about buying, maybe some tire-kickers, and folks like me – just interested in catching a glimpse of what the future might look like.
I kept looking at the young people in plain and plaid shirts and straw hats, wondering what they might think of that drone demo when they look back on it years from now. Some of them will change farming. Some of them may also choose to cut hay with a horse team. Some of them may even become volunteer firefighters in their rural communities. I hope they never are called to a manure pit rescue.
With the heat and wildfire smoke, we skipped the DNR tent and didn’t get the free water test. We saw just a fraction of the show. But it was enough to give us plenty to talk about on the drive home, plenty to ponder since then, and plenty to put on a mental list for the next time my husband and I go on a date to a farm show.
Maybe we’ll see you there.
Donna Kallner writes from Langlade County in rural northern Wisconsin.
The post 45 Degrees North: Why Go To A Farm Show? appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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