On Friday, March 4th I had the opportunity to get out of the office for most of the day and head to Dayton, Iowa for the 19th Annual Dayton Ag Expo. Now let me explain the setting as best I can. Since many of you that are reading this blog are my age, which is the age of disco, polyester shirts, Charlie’s Angels, the Trans Am, three television stations, and a phone with a cord attached to it, you should also remember the old school gymnasiums attached to the hundreds of small town school buildings around the state. The Dayton Ag Expo is held in a gym just like we all remember. The floor, with the painted area of basketball lanes, the half court line, and the out-of-bounds lanes still there for everyone to see, as well as the stage area where you could almost hear the screaming of fans during a girls six on six basketball game in the 60’s and 70’s. According to my father, who happened to see me that day, I too visited the old S.E. Webster gymnasium as a youngster watching my older sisters play ball for their rival Cedar Valley. I must have watched a few hundred of those six on six games of which I always considered more exciting than many of the girl’s five on five games we see today.

Since the gym floor was the show floor, you can almost imagine our booth space was about as big as me, a couple yards long and darn near a half a yard wide, but I’m a pretty big guy. It was big enough to put our display on a table and put out our newspaper rack with a few publications on it. Although this show is small in stature, it is big in personality because the people of Dayton are so down-to-earth and friendly and everything is free. Free donuts, free coffee, free lunch with help from the Webster County Pork Producers, and my favorite free peanuts. At the booth right next to me, the town of Dayton had the gall of putting a big box of peanuts in the shell on an empty table. Now first of all, that’s like putting a bowl of candy on a fat kid’s bed or handing a vomit bag to an anorexic, I am addicted so I stood there and ate them all day long. Secondly, by the end of the show, even a ninja couldn’t walk around without everyone hearing his footsteps. Every isle was so covered with empty shells you couldn’t even see the wooden floor.

The Farm News booth seemed to be a popular place to stand around, and not just because the good old peanuts five feet away, but because another old nut, as in my father, was there and he knows everybody! These conversations that people have with Dad are not your normal hi and bye type conversations, these can last an eternity. The conversations tend to vary from crops to the good old days before I was even a twinkle in his eye. So between dad drawing a bigger crowd than some of our speakers in past Farm News Ag Shows, to those darn peanuts, to people registering for prizes at our booth, to people stopping by and mentioning how much they loved Farm News, I was busy all day long. So bigger isn’t always better. The town did a great job and I had an enjoyable day of conversation and peanuts. Until next time.