How'd this exhibit come together?

Sure.

Well, I think many of the listeners will probably, anybody who's really familiar with the State Fair and the Expo Grounds and has spent time at the State Fair, you'd remember the old Ag and Hort building.

Well, I hope this isn't a spoiler.

That building is no longer there.

There's some amazing, amazing renovations going on at the Ohio Expo Center and State Fair Grounds.

And as part of that big plan, some buildings were removed and some new buildings were planned.

When we go through this display, what are we going to experience? What are fairgoers going to experience? Hopefully, and hopefully better understand really about Ohio agriculture.

And so this is a great opportunity for that outreach and for that education.

It is.

So as we were imagining the exhibit and we thought about who the audience was, if you live and work in agriculture every day, this exhibit isn't for you.

I mean, you're going to enjoy it and your family's going to love it and please come.

It's going to be a great time.

But this exhibit is for the average fairgoer who does not get to interact with agriculture.

And so we've built and imagined and told the story throughout this entire experience for folks who this maybe is the one time a year they get to learn about agriculture.

How do we traverse it and what are we going to learn about?

Ohio Farm Bureau's Marlene Eich talks about the vision behind the new building in the latest Ohio Agnet podcast.

Probably many listeners remember the Land and Living exhibit that was in the Agenhort building for many years that our staff and our team and many other partners got to come together on to kind of bring to life.

And as we all know, with all these amazing renovations and new things and new opportunities out at the Ohio State Fair and the Ohio Expo grounds, With the new Ohio Ag Center, we had the opportunity to really reimagine, pun totally intended, reimagine what that ag literacy footprint and that feature and what all of that looked like.

And so it's been really exciting for our team here at Farm Bureau to get to lead the charge with a lot of industry partners to bring to life this amazing exhibit.

It's a 75,000 square foot exhibit that we are bringing to life at this year's State Fair.

So can you walk us through the vision behind creating this new space and what Ohio Farm Bureau and your partners hope to accomplish with it?

Yeah, well, like you said, it was a blank slate.

And so we began last year at really brainstorming what would we want this to be and how could we tell this story? And so Ohio Farm Bureau's charge throughout this whole process has been to tell the story of Ohio agriculture on behalf of of all of ohio agriculture so we brought together those industry groups and our commodity partners to kind of really understand what were what were the important parts of all of our story that we wanted to tell the fairgoer and then we really dreamed very big and also accepted some proposals from some exhibit companies that would help us do this because we knew okay if we're going to do this differently than we ever have before remember 75 000 square feet is the exhibit then we were probably gonna need some really good exhibit partners as well.