Fairs Suffer In Drought

NYT:

But at county and state fairs across corn country this year, the most widespread drought since the 1950s is also evident. While the fairs are soldiering on, dousing themselves in Lemon Shake-Ups and Midwestern resolve, the hot, dry, endless summer has seeped into even the cheeriest, oldest tradition.

“You see the stress of this all on individuals everywhere you go — even the fair,” said Vivian Hallett, who most years has entries (and winners) in nearly every imaginable plant category at the Coles County Fair in Illinois. Not this year.

“We just didn’t have the stuff,” said Ms. Hallett, 65. “All our pumpkins have died. Zucchinis? Dead. Our green beans are just sitting there turning rubbery. And my gladiolas never came up at all.”

Fair judges speak of discolored, shrunken vegetables and nearly empty categories (only one gladiola appeared at the Dane County Fair, a judge there said). But in some places, human attendance has shriveled, too — some combination, organizers say, of miserably hot weather and larger, overwhelming concerns back home on the farms.

“It was the roughest I’ve seen,” said Gary Shemanski, facilities manager at the Johnson County Fair in Iowa. There, he said, attendance fell, four rabbits perished in heat that passed 100 degrees, and a beloved, final fireworks display was canceled for fear of setting off a fire in the bone-dry county.

For some among the hundreds of agricultural fairs across the country — and particularly for the largest state-level fairs — events have gone along apace this summer, organizers said. Healthy numbers of visitors arrived, as did long lists of contest entries in a summer when rural families may need a distraction more than ever.

Fairs are on a long, slow trend toward irrelevance, one more casualty of the population shift from rural areas to suburbia, and the declining numbers of farmers and small family farms.  The drought doesn't help that any, but somebody could write a story about fairs struggling every year.