The Department of Agriculture announced this week that attendance at the South Dakota State Fair this year was down 47.4% compared to 2019.
Well, the Department didn’t actually announce that decline. They just said a bunch of people came and showed critters and art and spent money and declared the Fair a success:
The South Dakota State Fair celebrated its 135th fair September 3-7, themed ‘Perfect Vision of Fun,’ an event that showcased youth, tradition, agriculture, and South Dakota heritage.
“It was great to see family and friends coming together to celebrate their achievements and enjoy the Fair safely, and responsibly,” said Peggy Besch, South Dakota State Fairgrounds manager. “This year presented many challenges, but we embraced them and worked hard to host a safe and successful event.”
Nearly 1,600 competitive exhibitors participated in various open class livestock and non-livestock competitions, entering more than 8,300 exhibits. There were nearly 800 Future Farmers of America (FFA) entries and over 3,000 4-H livestock and static exhibit entries. Open class exhibitors took home more than $92,000 in premiums and there was a 10% increase in livestock exhibitors with a 16% overall increase in entries.
“The State Fair attracted 107,992 guests who spent nearly $1.3 million on goods, beverages, specialty concessions, and carnival rides,” said Besch. “In addition, we had 290 commercial exhibitors, concessionaires, and vendors showcased. We knew the pandemic would impact attendance, but we’re very pleased with these numbers.”
The Fair was a success in part, due to the additional safety measures in place, including hand sanitizing stations, extra hand washing stations, social distancing, and enhanced cleaning and disinfecting protocols [emphasis mine; South Dakota Department of Agriculture, press release, 2020.10.20].
Attendance last year was 205,172. That was a 5.6% decline from 2018 attendance. The Department of Agriculture didn’t mention that relatively meager decrease last year, either. But when attendance was up in 2017, that increase was the headline in the Department’s propaganda, even though the increase was a mere 0.22%. Tiny increases—BIG NEWS!!! Historic decreases—hey, check out our hand-sanitizing stations. Positive pants, positive pants.
From 2006 through 2019 (that’s the range I can find easily before supper), the South Dakota State Fair averaged 186,000 visitors each year. Attendance racheted up 15% in 2014 to a new normal above 200,000 that persisted until this pandemic year.
Don’t blame anyone in Pierre or Huron for low attendance. Rather, applaud the hundred thousand visitors who had the good sense to stay home at the beginning of September, or go camping out in the wilderness, or go almost anywhere other than another potential coronavirus superspreader event in our fair state.
The halving of State Fair attendance could be taken as a small sign that we are smarter than the Governor we have elected to leave lead us. But here’s the socio-touristical question I find really interesting: why was State Fair attendance down by 47.4% just three weeks after attendance at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was down only 7.5%?
Cory, you are so good to SD people and others at exposing data and figures in an honest, pertinent manner. Thank you! I and others I’m sure really tire of seeing the barrage of percentage increase that strokes someone’s ego but does little for humanity.
Why do you cast your hate onto the state fair, Mr. H?
People love the state fair, and would love it even more if it moved to Rapid City.
To the 53% trump virus deniers “You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons”
Trump’s highpoint tonight: Biden is “like a vacuum cleaner”. JFC. Kevin McCarthy (R, CA) might be even be smarter than Trump, but i doubt it. Trump is POTUS. Unbelievable.
The Daily Beast
China’s Xi Jinping Sees Trump as a Walking Power Vacuum
Brendon Hong 6/18/2020
It would appear that South Dakotans are realists who understood that a place like the state fair had great potential to be a super spreader event so they stayed home.
The attendees at the rally, mostly trump devotees, must not have been as intelligent.
1.) [In 2018] President Donald Trump suggested Finland has few wildfires because the nation spends a lot of time “raking and cleaning” forest floors, many were confused. Not least of all the Finns themselves — or the Californians Trump was visiting, whose state has been devastated by fires that have killed at least 76 and burned hundreds of thousands of acres in the past two weeks.
But confused or not, Finns took to social media — vacuum at hand — to prove their dedication to their newfound civic duty.
Under the hashtag #haravointi (“raking”), some Finns spent this weekend grabbing their gardening tools — with the more creative types picking up their vacuums and Roomba devices — and visiting the woods to document their public service. Twitter
But seriously, climate is pretty important—
2.) “Amy Coney Barrett, if her confirmation process goes as Republicans hope, could still be serving on the Supreme Court in 2050. By then, the United Nations estimates that anywhere between 25 million and one billion people will have been displaced by the impacts of global warming within and between countries, as large stretches of the planet become unbearably hot.
Crop yields in America’s grain belt and Southwest could be decimated. The Arctic Ocean may well have been ice-free for 15 years.
Just 10 percent of the U.S. population by that point is expected to live outside of cities. Should Barrett die in office at a similar age to Ruth Bader Ginsberg, senators representing tiny and increasingly uninhabitable slivers of this country will still be empowered to confirm her replacement.
We can avoid parts of this future. But it’s getting increasingly hard to imagine doing so if today’s judiciary branch remains intact. The future Supreme Court, and the 6–3 conservative majority that now seems imminent, won’t just be empowered to overturn Roe v. Wade, as many are focusing on this week. It will also likely rule on the most important components of any prospective climate action: any new attempts by the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, for example, and the EPA’s leeway to interpret statutes like the Clean Air Act. The same anti-democratic crusade that made reasonable solutions to the climate crisis seem unimaginable has also made Barrett’s confirmation feel inevitable.
At this point, any new climate policy is likely to face the threat of a legal battle. “We know from recent history that if movements and the Democratic Party get behind the kind of legislation we need imminently to respond to climate crisis,” says Samuel Moyn, a constitutional law professor at Yale, “the judiciary can be devastating, and not just in really open ways but through interpreting the law and selectively invalidating it. To me, the struggle is about getting the Supreme Court out of the way.”
“Dressed as constitutional originalism, the right’s focus on the judiciary has benefited not just the National Rifle Association or religious groups looking to avoid current norms toward tolerance but also business interests looking to avoid pollution controls and, for practical and ideological reasons, to wholly dismantle an administrative state that might infringe on their profits.
Charles Koch, better known for funding climate denial and efforts to kill climate policy since the 1990s, has also been a major donor to the Federalist Society, which Barrett and countless other conservative jurists have cycled through. His advocacy group Americans for Prosperity has led well-funded charges in support of all of Trump’s Supreme Court nominations, including Barrett. The same donors and dark money outfits that have funded climate denial—the Searle Freedom Trust, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and Mercer Family Foundation—have given generously to the Federalist Society, too. Right-wing donor-advised fund DonorsTrust has been a major benefactor of bodies like the Judicial Crisis Network, which organize a flood of amicus briefs to put cases in front of the Supreme Court. Seeded by a munitions and chemicals empire, the Olin Foundation has been central to the Federalist Society’s success and instrumental in backing a movement within law schools known as “law and economics,” to ensure that laws protect efficient markets above all else. In a recent Yale Law Journal article, legal scholars Jedediah Britton-Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski, and K. Sabeel Rahman describe this as a “twentieth-century synthesis” that “simultaneously recognizes and embraces the fact that law makes markets, while demanding that the satisfaction of markets becomes the aim of politics.”” https://newrepublic.com/article/159766/supreme-court-design…_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Attendance figures indicate State Fair goers are generally smarter than Sturgis Rally goers.