The State Fair

The Iowa State Fair’s annual livestock show, with competitive judging of beef and dairy cattle, hogs, sheep, horses, poultry, and more, is among the world’s largest.

Behind the scenes of a farming family tradition.

It’s nearly midnight and a lone figure, flashlight in hand, prowls the abundant vegetable garden in Cambridge, Iowa. Sonya Colvin is intent on finding just the right carrot or sweet potato, even at this late hour. After all, tomorrow is the Iowa State Fair, and she intends to win a ribbon.

Her show vegetables already had been picked, cleaned, labeled, and readied for delivery to the fairgrounds by 6 a.m., but at the 11th hour, some don’t pass muster. “There’s always one that’s not perfect in the bunch, so you have to find a better one,” she says.

This competitive spirit takes hold every August in the Colvin household as the state fair approaches. Everyone — Sonya, husband Tom, son Christopher, 21, and daughter Kristel, 14 — participates in this longtime family tradition, which began shortly after the Colvins were married, when Tom watched crop judging at the fair.

“I saw gallons of shelled corn at the fair and thought, ‘If I can’t do that I can’t do much of anything,’” Tom recalls. “So we saved some corn and entered it.” Since then, the Colvins have entered in many popular categories — crops, vegetables, dairy cattle, sheep, turkeys, photography, crafts, baking, quilting — and some less-familiar competitions such as computer technology, public speaking, and weed identification.

Each year they come home with their share of ribbons and at least enough prize money to cover their entry costs. But the competition is fierce. The Iowa State Fair’s annual livestock show, with competitive judging of beef and dairy cattle, hogs, sheep, horses, poultry, and more, is among the world’s largest. Its food department is believed to be the largest of any state fair.

Old-fashioned fun
Iowa’s fair is legendary, captured in the acclaimed novel, Broadway play, and movie, State Fair. The story, like the fair itself, is a celebration of farm life, revolving around a close-knit family’s weekend at the 1946 Iowa State Fair in Des Moines. The old-fashioned fun portrayed in State Fair still exists in the real fair’s farm equipment displays, carnival rides, blue-ribbon competition, and its world-famous Butter Cow, a 550-pound, life-size sculpture made of butter, a favorite attraction dating back to 1911.

The Butter Cow, in its refrigerated display case, played a role in Tom’s life as a youngster during his family’s annual fair visits. “If you got lost, you met at the Butter Cow,” he says. Even now, his family looks forward to seeing the cow, sculpted for the last 40 years by central Iowa’s Norma “Duffy” Lyon. “We get to see her finishing when we take Kristel’s dairy cow the day before the fair,” says Sonya. “Right there makes it worth going to the fair.”

Scores of others find good reasons to attend the fair; attendance is expected to top a million when the fair is held Aug. 10-20.

Last-minute preparations
The Colvins’ 85-acre farm, where they raise livestock, poultry, and various crops, is a flurry of activity the week before. Tom, a U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher, readies his pickup for the 20-mile trip to Des Moines and helps Kristel clip her show cow. His corn and soybean seed entries have been ready since last fall, when they were picked and packaged after harvest.

After a day’s work, Chris, a residence hall computer coordinator at Iowa State University, helps his sister clean leather halters and pre-measure feed for the show animals. He no longer shows animals because of a busy schedule — he’ll be a senior this fall at Iowa State — opting instead for categories less time-consuming such as weed identification and photography.

Kristel scrambles to perfect her baking entries, brush the sheep, groom her calf, stitch a quilt patch, make her crafts entries, study weeds, try on last year’s white pants (white attire is required for showing dairy cattle), and gather equipment such as buckets, pitchforks, shovels, and brooms.

Her entries reflect her diverse interests and high energy, and some projects, such as her corn art — pictures or crafts created with corn kernels and husks — won’t be started until exhibition day. “I don’t get a good idea until then,” she explains. “The glue gun is a favorite tool of the last-minute person.”

With the instincts of an air traffic controller, Sonya keeps track of her family’s activities while finishing her own entries—including a memory quilt she’s making from uniforms Tom wore in Vietnam.

Valuable lessons
Showing dairy cows and raising other stock has provided her children important experience in buying animals, earning money, and taking responsibility, Sonya says. Chris was 10 and Kristel was 9 when they got their first calves, both through the statewide Share-A-Heifer Program in which 4-H and Future Farmers of America members earn money by raising young cows on loan from cattle producers.

The kids pay feed and vet bills and halter break, show, and breed their heifers. After two years, they become half-owners of what is now a dairy cow, thereby getting half the proceeds when the milker is sold. By raising cattle and other stock (Kristel is raising four pigs), Chris and Kristel have earned enough money for college.

“She takes responsibility,” Sonya says proudly of her daughter’s initiative. “For example, she made the phone call to buy the pigs and arranged for them to be picked up. When we brought the pigs home, she had everything sitting by the pig pens ready to go.”

Chris will graduate from Iowa State next year virtually debt-free (his only debt is for a $1,000 computer) because of money he made raising stock. “About my sophomore year in high school, it hit me how expensive college was,” he says. “I realized the harder I worked the more income I’d generate.”

Indirectly, the fair helped Chris discover he’d rather work with computers than cows. “Trimming cows seemed pointless, and I hated wearing the white pants.” As a 4-H project, he developed a sheep management database in 1997 to track the lineage and record data of his family’s purebred Columbia sheep. His program won a blue ribbon at the Story County Fair, and was entered in the state fair.

Friendly rivalries
Colvin family members often compete against each other in good-natured rivalry. Sonya and Chris both entered photographs one year, and three of his were displayed. “If you’re even shown, it’s an accomplishment,” notes his mother.

Then there’s the longstanding corn art rivalry between Sonya and Kristel. Last year Kristel’s sun, made of corn kernels with husks as rays, beat out Sonya’s table arrangement.

Competition between Colvins particularly is fierce in weed identification, in which contestants must write down the names of 25 potted weeds. Chris has netted several blue ribbons, but his sister is starting to accumulate some of her own.

Family unity
They may compete against each other in Des Moines, but at home the Colvins are a tight-knit family. When Kristel’s two heifers were scheduled to compete at the same time last year, her father, who juggles his work schedule to be with his family during the fair, showed one for her. When Tom’s ear corn was ready to harvest last fall for this year’s fair, he was busy in the fields, so Kristel gathered the corn for him.

“Working on projects gives us a shared goal to work toward. We spend time together planning, getting things ready, having meals at the fair, helping each other out, and having fun,” Sonya says. “And you can spend a lot of time talking to each other with no TV, radio, computer or such, while you’re sitting in the dairy barn keeping an eye on the cows.”

Indeed, Tom and Sonya Colvin, with a little help from the state fair, have nurtured an enduring enthusiasm for working and playing together as a family. And it looks like their children agree. “If I ever have children,” Chris says, “I hope they can do something like this.”

Leanna Skarnulis is a freelance writer based in Omaha, Neb.

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