I was a fourth grader. It was 1985, and my parents loaded us up and took us to the Farm Progress Show in Knightstown, Ind.
I remember the cornstalks and dirt-packed streets. Striped tents everywhere, and so many people. Green Pioneer jackets with corduroy collars, and red Funk’s G hats. Dozens of seed companies.
At one point, we sat down in the women’s tent, and I got picked to go on stage. I don’t remember what we did, but at the end, they handed me a mechanical pencil, and let me tell you, that was high-tech in 1985. I was the envy of the fourth grade, thanks to that trick where you pull the lead way out, hold down the top and pretend it’s a shot into someone’s arm.
The woman who called me up to the stage was Joann Alumbaugh. Fast-forward 13 years when I became a shiny new field editor at Farm Progress; she was editor of Hog Producer and my favorite new colleague. She gives the best hugs, and we still marvel that we met on that Farm Progress stage 40 years ago. For decades, she manned the stage in what would become the rural living tent, introducing Cap’n Stubby and so many more.
Those were the days when the show rotated among Illinois, Indiana and Iowa. A different farm family hosted every year, and a city sprang up out of a cornfield for three days, complete with electricity and streets and thousands of people.
Those good old days are wrapped in a warm blanket of nostalgia until you remember the rain. And the mud! And the traffic. It’s not hard to see why Farm Progress went to permanent sites in 2005.
In the beginning
When the Farm Progress Show started in 1953, it was the brainchild of Prairie Farmer editor Paul Johnson and advertising manager Vern Anderson. They wanted to do something following the cornhusking contests that Prairie Farmer sponsored until 1941. But as horsepower took over, it didn’t make sense to look back. They decided to invite manufacturers and agribusinesses to show their wares to farmers.
“We wanted to make it a quality show to help advertisers and the farmers who came,” Johnson wrote.
Prairie Farmer held the first show on Oct. 2, 1953, on the Earl Bass farm at Armstrong, Ill., with 112 exhibitors and over 75,000 people in attendance. By 1960, they expanded the show to three days and alternated among the three states, with more than 250 exhibitors. It was the biggest gathering of Midwest farmers in the nation.
TIME MACHINE: Cornhusking contests, many sponsored by Prairie Farmer, were the forerunner and inspiration for the first Farm Progress Show in 1953. (Farm Progress)
Fit to print
For my money, the best stories from the show heydays of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s come from my senior editorial friends. That was when editors parked cars and worked with the state police to direct traffic, and they dug holes and put up signs and painted fence posts. Get Tom Bechman, John Otte and Frank Holdmeyer talking, maybe late in the evening, and they’ll tell you stories we can’t print.
But not all! Like the (in)famous dancing bear of the 1985 show. Tom and John Otte were directing traffic on the first morning. It rained and a pickup with a livestock rack pulled out of the line of traffic stretching down a long, muddy lane. Looked like something funny in the back.
The guy got out and said what’s never before nor since been uttered at the Farm Progress Show: “I’ve got a bear, and I gotta get it to the exhibit field!”
He was not kidding.
“Turns out, he had a dancing bear, used in the bar circuit in Indianapolis, and one of the chain saw companies had booked the bear for their exhibit,” Tom says. “We got him directions, he headed east and we never saw him again!”
Or there was the 1992 show, when Vice President Dan Quayle attended. Part of keeping him safe meant giving the traffic crew a bogus route plan and then changing it at the last minute. Makes sense afterward, but less so when the crew looked up to see a string of black limousines rolling hard across a cornstalk field, dust billowing.
Raising the bar
Tom will tell you he misses the camaraderie of those days, if not the car parking.
“It was all hands on deck,” he recalls. “Now we treat it more like a professional show, and we’re doing what we should be doing.”
And by that, he means editors are out digging up stories instead of digging post holes.
“There was something unique about going to a farm back then. It was a badge of honor to go to the show. People were different then, too,” Tom says, adding that as farmers became more professional, they expected more from the show — like smooth traffic, real bathrooms and less mud.
And exhibitors expect more for their investment, as they should. There are endless stories from rained-out show days, but 2003 in Illinois was the big one. We were riding high from a tremendous Tuesday, capped off by a Brad Paisley concert in the evening, and as we slept in Danville, 6 inches of rain dumped squarely on the show site near Henning. Wednesday was canceled, and then Thursday. My car was stuck in the mud, and we watched the Montgomery Gentry tour bus roll out of Danville — the Wednesday night concert. It was a low point.
No one can sustain those losses over time.
So today, we alternate between two permanent sites, with the other in Boone, Iowa. Beneath the Decatur site lies a commercial storm sewer with 30-inch pipe outlets, with inverted crown roads that route water off exhibits to intakes. If we have to cancel now, it’s because of lightning.
Matt Jungmann has been the show’s fearless leader for nearly 30 years, and I never go to a major outdoor event without wondering how Matt would handle it. Incidentally, Matt met his wife, Krystal — my 4-H House roommate — at the 2000 show in Cantrall, Ill. Their 21-year-old son, Jack, tells a great story about literally growing up at the show.
This year, you’ll get far better than a mechanical pencil at the show. From drones to satellites, the technology will blow your mind. Maybe, just maybe, 40 years from now, some future agricultural professional will remember their trip to the 2025 Farm Progress Show.
And oh, how far we will have come.
Comments? Send email holly.spangler@farmprogress.com.