HOME / recycled: Previously published Slate articles made new.

The Evolution of the Minnesota State FairHow 4-H kids run the show.

By Ben CrairPosted Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2008, at 7:38 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

RSS

Related in Slate

Unlike the 4-H kids, Jon Katz names his barn animals: Read about his steer, Elvis, and his rooster, Winston. Katz also deciphers "country talk" and explains why we shouldn't assume our pets think like us. Andy Bowers describes Minnesota's politics.

The fair, which makes such a glorious display of the source and the final form of our meals, is mum on the process that connects the two, and the event's one glaring absence is a slaughterhouse. On the road beside the cow and swine barns, you can purchase a foot-long hot dog, a corn dog, a pork-chop sandwich, a cheeseburger, a taco, shredded pork, and ribs. The farm kids, to whom most of the animals belong and who show them in the fair's 4-H competitions, hold no illusions about their animals' fates. They go about tending their animals with an economical detachment and leave the oohing and the aahing to their nonrural visitors.

I am one of these suburban know-nothings, and I expose my ignorance to a helpful farm kid named Burch when I ask him the name of his speckle-faced sheep. Burch's sheep doesn't have a name, and neither do most of the other animals in the barn. A 9-year-old named Ryan, whose brother is showing a pig, explains to me the exception: "People only usually name boars, because they have the semen, and that's how they make babies."

Kids like Ryan and Burch are easily approachable and happy to chat. So are their elders—plainly handsome men and women who converse in twos and threes while grooming their animals. A farmer named Doug Pamp welcomes my approach, first providing all manner of information about the sheep he is shearing, before turning to his farm, the fair, the war in Iraq, illegal immigration, and the meaning of America. He releases me half an hour later with an aching hand and four notebook pages scribbled with illegible notes on the ideal shape of a sheep.

Pamp has attended the fair regularly since 1957, and it has evolved in those 50 years. "The old grizzled showmen like myself are gone," he claims. The fair "used to be much more rural. This is a city fair, not a country or a farm fair anymore." He points me toward Machinery Hill as an example of this change. In Pamp's youth, the hill was the place to see the latest farm technologies. Today, the John Deeres and grain silos are still on display, but it is mostly a showcase for car dealers to display the latest models from Ford and Dodge and Chevy.

Pamp's nostalgia isn't a criticism of the present fair: Unlike the days of his youth, when most farmers were lucky to have finished the eighth grade, most of today's are college-educated, and because of improvements in breeding, "the sheep we showed 50 years ago wouldn't even show up today." He sees the fair as an opportunity for nonrural Minnesotans to reconnect with the agricultural past that nearly all of them share. And, perhaps most important, it is an opportunity to educate and motivate Minnesota's young farmers. "We need to make sure we've got the next generation," he says.

Based on my observation of the 4-H kids, I think it is safe to venture that for them, the fair is still the farming exhibition that it was when Doug Pamp was a child. The carnies drift to whatever fair beckons next; the nonrural visitors leave with stomachaches. The farm kids eschew these temptations. They dabble in the fair food but also bring lunches from home. In years of attendance, many have never even been on a ride; the best review I can get from a farm kid is a shrug for the bumper boats from a 13-year-old steer-owning boy named Garrett. In their free time, which Ryan's mother, Pam, assures me they have little of, the kids sit in circles in empty pens, playing cards or games like Farm-Opoly. Given the setting, with not one but two video arcades a short walk away, it is astonishing to see youngsters with the temperaments to shuffle and deal a deck of cards. In their appearance, they are barely distinguishable from the fair's other attendees: They wear checkered Vans and Death Cab for Cutie T-shirts. Pamp says that "urban versus rural isn't as different as it was 50 years ago." What's remarkable is not so much that the kids don't pursue the deep-fried candy bars and the Slingshot, but rather that they choose not to.