It’s a familiar scene each winter in many rural communities.
The annual farm show means combines, tractors, livestock pens and lots of baked goods brought together under one roof. It’s a chance for businesses to exhibit their products and for farmers to check out new equipment.
“I love this show,” said Bill Taylor, a farmer who visited the Central Missouri Ag Club Ag Expo in Sedalia, Missouri, in early February despite a half a foot of snow. “If you want to talk to a guy you can, if you want to walk by, you can. And that’s what we like about it.”
Like most farm shows, the Sedalia event was canceled last year over COVID concerns. This year, organizers were determined to hold it in person.
Yet the pandemic has been just the latest pressure on farm shows around the Midwest. With a changing business landscape, what has long been a staple of agricultural life may be nearing an end.
“We were well on this path. COVID just proved the point to a lot of people,” said Jim Mandes, northern region sales manager at Krone North America, a company that makes machines for hay production like mowers and balers.
Mandes said the decades-old tradition of equipment makers, seed companies and other businesses that sell to farmers making the rounds to dozens of shows each year have been less cost effective as time goes on.
“Customers today, they know more about what they are buying than they did 20 years ago, 10 years ago, three years ago. The relevance of a trade show, physically seeing machines and talking to reps, is not what it once was,” Mandes said.
Mandes said Krone is focusing more on being more selective about which ones they attend. Other agriculture companies are looking at more cost efficient ways to have meaningful interactions with potential customers, be it through an app or an individualized virtual experience.
“I think a lot of companies were on the interstate looking for the exit ramp and COVID gave them that exit ramp to kind of change up the way they do things,” said Brent Adams, a farm podcaster and radio host, during an online forum last fall on the future of farm shows hosted by North American Ag.
Adams said nostalgia and tradition will keep some farm shows going, but a push for using technology to connect people and more effective spending of marketing dollars will diminish their impact and numbers.
The idea that small town farm shows could be on their way out concerns people like Jock Hedblade, executive director of the Macomb Area Convention and Visitors Bureau in west central Illinois.
Western Illinois University, sponsor of the annual Ag-Mech show in Macomb, canceled the gathering for the second year in a row because of COVID.
“It’s more than just the financial hit of not selling hotel rooms, meals and shopping trips to visitors. There’s a morale element to it, too,” Hedblade said.
For a small town, a farm show is part trade show, part community event and a big element of a town’s identity. And while Hedblade is confident the Ag-Mech show will return to Macomb next year, he’s not sure every show will survive.
“Some of these towns won’t be able to recoup these types of shows,” he said. “I think that’s because it loses its momentum. Sometimes these are volunteers that put these together and it’s hard to keep people involved.”
