PA Farm Show
by Bill Gadbow, photos and videos by Chris Gadbow
Chris and I grew up in Upstate New York, so we are used to harsh winters with a lot of snow. The part of winter that you never get used to is the Cabin Fever that sets in during the second week of January. That’s when you start to get a little crazy because you are completely bored with being stuck indoors so much. The inevitable post-holidays adrenaline crash comes at the same time, and the really short daytime hours don’t help either. When Cabin Fever hit us this year, we decided to cheer ourselves up by going to the largest indoor agricultural exposition under one roof in the nation. That would be the 2022 Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg.
The Food
The first thing that we did was eat.
Half of one ridiculously large pavilion was dedicated to food. Hot sausage, corndogs, fried vegetables, pierogies, potato pancakes, bloomin’ onions, homemade donuts, ice cream, apple desserts. We chose roast beef sandwiches, which were huge and delicious. Since the horse radish serving utensil was a ladle, I put a big scoop on my sandwich, thinking it couldn’t be that hot. Wrong. It was plenty strong. So, a few pieces of meat got wasted scraping off the excess horse radish. No problem. Did I mention that the sandwiches were huge?
The absolutely most popular food item is the chocolate milkshakes. These are made with super rich whole milk. They are better than ice cream. I had one about twenty years ago and loved it. Unfortunately, back then, I had forgotten (or ignored) that I am lactose intolerant. The car ride home from that farm show was eventful. Our family still talks about it. Despite that, it was still really hard not to get a milkshake this year. They are that good!
The Animals
The heart of the show is the animals on display. One entire pavilion is dedicated to just dairy cows. Half of another pavilion was being used to highlight newborn calves. We had just missed a new birth and the mom was caring for her baby. There were llamas, alpacas, rabbits, sheep, horses, chickens, turkeys, and ducks. I don’t remember seeing any goats or pigs. Maybe they were in one of the pavilions that we missed. The complex is absolutely huge, so it would be easy to miss some of the show.
We were there on the last day of the show, so it wouldn’t have been a surprise if the animals were a little stressed out from the tens of thousands of people streaming by them all week. That wasn’t the case. The animals were clearly at ease and contentedly eating and drinking. Some were sleeping and others were calmly checking out the people as the people walked by.
Check out Chris’s cows and people video on the home page and her chicken video on the More Videos tab.
The People
A typical crowd for the eight-day show totals in the neighborhood of 500,000. So that’s about sixty thousand per day. This year, with people still being cautious about the pandemic, the crowds were lower. But there were still a lot of people there. Scanning the tens of thousands of visitors who were there with us on the last day of the show, it seemed like there were a lot of young adults, teen-agers, and families with small children. Very few were wearing masks and the crowd was calm, relaxed, and happy. It was nice. Chris and I are planning to go on a long trip in February and didn’t want to chance getting sick before that, so we wore masks. It is what it is.
The Exhibits
There were two separate pavilions with informational exhibits. Quite a few of them were right on point for this website. There were several dedicated to native plants, responsible foresting, and agriculture complementing healthy natural environments. At one booth we had a good conversation about the Spotted Lantern Fly. This year, they almost completely disappeared from my yard, but the environmental experts at the show were saying that they seem to move around, even within a single season. It’s too early to tell whether the infestation is declining.
The Contests
All of the animals being exhibited were competing for best in their class. It was especially cool when kids were the exhibitors.
There was an especially cool contest in the culinary arts area where the contestants had built landscapes out of food in the genera of gingerbread houses. My favorite was one that had a house constructed primarily out of ice cream cones.
Another contest was making sculptures out of butter. The sponsor provided this life-sized display, carved out of butter, and refrigerated behind glass. It takes more than a few sticks to make a six-foot statue of a person. Even more to make the whole family.
The Vendors
I almost bought a sauna for our finished basement, but Chris reminded me that we can sauna at the health club anytime we want for free. Yeah. We don’t need that.
Besides food, there were a lot of crafts. Paintings, photos, little statues. With more than a few alpaca and llama vendors, there were gloves, hats, scarves, and other clothing items made out of this very soft fur.
A Little History
In the mid 1600’s William Penn organized a gathering of farmers in Pennsylvania to share their knowledge. For the next several hundred years these gatherings were informal and held at various locations. In 1917, the first state-wide show was held in Harrisburg, called the “Pennsylvania Corn, Fruit, Vegetable, Dairy Products, and Wool Show”.
The show grew in popularity and periodic building projects culminated in 2001 with a $76 million expansion of the Farm Show complex. This increased the exhibit space to almost one million square feet, with eight major halls and three arenas. Currently the Farm Show is able to host more than half-a-million visitors over an eight-day period. It is the largest indoor agricultural show in the United States and, together with the Paris International Agricultural Show, the largest in the world.