The Peace Country Classic Agri Show rolled into Evergreen Park over the weekend for yet another successful year.
The event featured everything agriculture from machinery, to 4H events, horse programs and a bull sale. Show president Ross Mathers said, while they don't have any final numbers, he expects that the number of visitors was in the 18,000 range.
"We thought it was good," he said. "We had a few more people over into the horse building and stayed for a little longer and the bull sale was right full as usual."
Mathers said the average price for a bull went for around $6,500, which would put the sale on par with last year's average, 'which is strong' he added.
Mathers said in addition to several new vendors, there was also new activities for people to check out.
"We had two or three more events. We had a kids farm auction, you might say, where they donated food to the food bank and ATB (Financial) in turn gave them funny money for the dollar's worth so for every five dollars worth of food, they got $500 worth of funny money and then we auctioned off some kids toys and toy tractors and there was a wagon and bicycles and it went really, really well," he said. "There were a few disappointed kids when they got to the limit of their money and their mom and dad had to tell them they were out but that's what this was all about, a little bit of an experience."
Mathers said a large horse program was also added for this year which started at 10 a.m. and went all three days until 5 p.m.
"It attracted a lot of people. There was all various disciplines of the horse industry there and we... increased our Craft Corner. We had quite a few exhibitors in the Craft Corner and they feel they all did really well," he said.
Popular in farming this year were air seeding and zero till options.
"We had a few more vendors selling haying equipment like how to protect your bales, wrapping them and things like that - bale handlers, they were quite popular. Solar watering seems to be very interesting, a lot of people are really in to that kind of stuff, like heating their water by solar (energy)," he said. "Lots of different grain products, fertilizer products, things like that."
The local 4H groups also had a good time.
"They had a good turn out. They had I think about 18 heifers and steers and about 25 sheep. It went really well," said Mathers. "Everybody had a lot of fun. They had a little 4H judging show of horses. Glenn Stewart, one of our horse demo guys, he supplied four nice horses and critiqued their judging on the horsemanship so it went really well. And the petting zoo was a real hit."
The Agri Show is one of the larger fundraisers for Evergreen Park and the show president said he expects the show raised between $50,000 to $60,000.
"I'd like to thank Evergreen Park and our committee. We worked hard and it went really well," he said.
Twitter: @DHTJocelyn