Farm Fair

Ah, Farm Fair.  You will forever live in my fondest of childhood memories.

Every November Farm Fair International, along with the CFR, comes to Edmonton and almost every year my family spends a day going through the exhibits and sometimes we see the rodeo.  When I was a child, Farm Fair was magical.  As the years passed, it became more...commercialized.  Each year, the agricultural exhibits seem to be fewer in number, while the number of vaccuum cleaner companies and sellers of pots and pans steadily increases.  Each year I leave a little disappointed, but I keep going back because Farm Fair is tradition. So it was that my parents and I journeyed to the city today to experience Farm Fair 2014.

This time, it was different.  Yesterday I went to my last class of the day before heading home for the long weekend.  There were only five students in class.  Many had already left for the weekend.  Others had taken the day off from classes to attend Agri-Trade, which I've heard is like Farm Fair, but better and takes place in Red Deer at the same time as Farm Fair.  To reward those of us who actually bothered to show up to class, our professor revealed a bonus assignment.  For those who would attend Agri-Trade on the weekend, we could gather promotional materials and business cards from five  booths that we visited and hand them in to prove that we actually talked to people.  I knew I wouldn't make it to Agri-Trade, so I asked my professor if I could do the assignment at Farm Fair instead.  He said I could.

When my parents and I arrived at Farm Fair today, I started to worry.  How could I do this assignment? Anyone who knows me knows that I don't talk much.  The mere thought of talking to new people has me in a near panic.  And my parents would be watching my failure and trying to rescue me and then they would end up basically doing it for me and then of course I couldn't hand it in.  We walked through all of the exhibits and checked out some bulls and all the while, I stubbornly refused to even try to talk to anyone.  I finally gave up.  It was only a bonus assignment, anyway.  I don't really need the extra marks.  But, I did have to get special permission to do the assignment at Farm Fair.  So now my professor will be expecting me to hand something in.  I have to do it!  Oh, the horror!

Around three in the afternoon, I left my parents behind, promising to meet up with them in half an hour and set of to do the assignment and go talk to people.  There was one hall in Northlands in particular that had a whole bunch of booths all together.  I went there first.  I walked up and down through the two short rows of booths, trying to get up some courage and think of intelligent questions to ask.  I passed by a booth advertising CowBytes 5 (a computer program that I had heard a little about in livestock class) and after rather creepily walking past it a few times, I walked over and asked as intelligent a question as I could.  It wasn't a very good one, but I kept on and eventually asked how the program works.  Apparently that's a magic question that gets you the full attention of the representative.  I finally got through the conversation with the representative with a good deal more knowledge and a small handful of papers.  I felt pretty good about that until I realized that there were four more booths to go.  

Next, I found a demonstration of GrowSafe, a feeding/testing system that is used at the college farm.  We have been introduced to the system, but never got much information about it.  I had to wait a long time to talk to the representative.  It gave me time to think of some good questions and to call my Mom and ask for an extra half hour (it was already 3:30).  That conversation was a bit harder, but I got through it okay and left with more knowledge and papers.  

My next stop was at the booth for Verified Beef Production's On-Farm Food Safety Program.  This, too, was something I had heard of at school.  I asked the representative how a person would get into the program.  That led to a rather confusing conversation about qualifying for some contest.  I finally asked the question again, a little more clearly and then explained that I was a student at Olds College and wanted to learn more about the program because we had only really been told about it in passing.  That was another magical sentence because by the time I left that booth, my handful of papers was significantly thicker.

By this time I had exhausted my options in that hall of booths.  There weren't any other booths that met my two personal criteria for approaching: (1) the booth should be relevant to me and (2) it must be manned by an actual human being.  Earlier in the afternoon, my dad and I had been checking out some Hi-Hog squeeze chutes, so I went back to that exhibit, found a representative and learned some fun stuff about the manual and hydraulic chutes.  Four down, one to go.

For my last conversation, I was momentarily stumped about where to go.  Then I remembered that we had walked by a display of alfalfa pellets at one point.  I searched around until I found the booth and talked to the representative.  That conversation also got off to an awkward start, until I threw out the whole "I'm a student looking to learn more about this" explanation.  That got me an exceptional conversation and a pamphlet and business card to add to the pile.  I was done.

Feeling rather proud of myself, though slightly frazzled and stressed out from having to talk to so many strangers all by myself, I worked my way through the crowd to the designated meeting place and found my parents finishing off some ice cream - without me.  No matter.  I still got to go through Farm Fair and this year, it was magical again.  Oh, the displays were still a bit disappointing and overly commercialized, but I learned more than ever before and some of it was even a little fun.  And I did it myself.  My bundle of pamphlets and business cards is sitting on the coffee table now, ready to be organized and handed in for my bonus marks.  Yes, it was a stressful experience, but in the evening, I got to let off steam in a way that I haven't been able to in almost two years.  When I was working on my history degree in Edmonton, I used to come downstairs at my uncle's house late in the evening and hold my cousin's new baby boy and just forget the stress of the day.  Tonight we went and visited my aunt, who happened to be be babysitting that very same little boy and I got to play with him and read to him and just forget about my homework for awhile.  Today was a good day to be a farmer, even if it was hard.  And it was an even better day to be a cousin.