Leader Photo by Lee Pulaski Despite dark clouds, the midway at the Shawano County Fair was abuzz with activity Monday.
Leader Photo by Lee Pulaski The TNT Polka Band performs the final show in President’s Park for the 2015 fair.
4-H barn awards given out Monday
The Seneca Stingers and Green Valley 4-H clubs are the 2015 recipients of the Shawano County Fair barn awards. The awards were given out Monday at the coliseum.
The awards are given out each year to the youth organizations that best keep the fairgrounds clean and inform non-farm visitors at the fair about their animals and what their families do for a living. According to Terri Brunner, 4-H assistant with the Shawano County University of Wisconsin-Extension, there are a number of visitors who have never farmed, and the fair is an ideal opportunity to tell agriculture’s story.
Although the two 4-H groups received accolades, the other youth organizations received some harsh words from Jamie Patton, the agriculture agent for UW-Extension. She noted that the animal barns were not kept clean this year as they had been during other years, and very few 4-H members took the initiative to be goodwill ambassadors.
“The judges (for the barn awards) saw animals that are filthy, barns that were filthy. I am not happy how we put our public face forward,” Patton said.
Weather closes fair early Sunday
Nice weather has prevailed through much of the Shawano County Fair, but stormy weather Sunday night forced an early closure and cancellations.
Brad Luepke, the fair’s marketing and promotions director, said Monday the midway closed down around 10 p.m. due to fears about lightning strikes near the area. The lightning also prompted fair officials to cancel the 8:30 p.m. performance of Johnny Wad, which Luepke said had a packed audience, as well as the Sunday installment of cosmic bingo.
The National Weather Service reported 1.67 inches of rain fell during the night in Shawano. Fair operations were back to normal on Monday.
Lutheran high school on its way to goal
A display in the commercial building at the Shawano County Fair shows that Wolf River Lutheran High School is almost halfway to its goal of building a new high school building in Shawano. The existing school is in aging facilities in Cecil.
The display shows there is $900,000 committed over three years toward building the school. About $396,000 of that is already in the bank.
The goal is to raise $2 million to build the new school.
FAIR NUMBERS
700
Number of cases of food provided by Reinhart Food Services to the nonprofit food booths for the fair
8,051,483
Number of corn and grain bushels produced annually by Shawano County farmers, according to a UW-Extension display
11,400
Number of steps a person needs to take in order to burn off an order of cheese curds at the fair, according to the Rural Health Initiative