The Farm Progress Show (FPS) last week was a success!  Despite some horrible temperatures, FPS indicates that they had record setting attendance of well over 100,000 visitors, many of which were international.  Illinois enjoyed some good media exposure including this interview (Garry Niemeyer of Auburn and Orion Samuelson) and some good coverage of our “Keep It for the Crop” announcement on Thursday which you can read more about here and here.

The IL Corn booth enjoyed quite a bit of traffic too.  Throughout the three day show, we gave away 2,000 “First Aid for Farmers” kits, providing information about how farmers can better communicate with their non-farm cousins.  The kit included IL Corn’s version of a pop-up video, congressional district information, a model presentation to personalize and use in your community and much more!  For a downloadable version of almost everything we used at Farm Progress Show, click here.

Of course, having Kenny Wallace in our booth for a couple of appearances on Tuesday and the entire day on Wednesday didn’t hurt our traffic any!  Thanks to Kenny for signing hundreds of photographs, identifying with tons of Illinois corn farmers, and generally lighting up our tent with his contagious personality!

We also convinced just shy of 500 farmers and visitors to write a letter to their Congressman and scored a visit from Congressman Bobby Schilling.  Illinois Corn board members chatted with him about government regulations and farm policy and we were able to show other farmers firsthand how a connection with your elected officials really matters.  We talked to farmers about helping themselves and hopefully YOU felt empowered to act after a visit to our tent!

During the show, Dave Loos hosted several scientist types on his “Corn Technology Tour” which focused on showing folks the improving technologies of corn production and Gary Hudson, Mike Plumer, and Rod Weinzierl hosted an IL EPA group on a tour through the show on the final day.  The Farm Progress Show provides a unique opportunity to showcase just how far agriculture has come and we wanted to utilize that opportunity to its fullest.

All in all, it was a great time to show farmers what we’re doing to help them, teach them how to help themselves, and show off some really great ag technologies to folks that might not already realize how smart farmers are!  We enjoyed the show and if you didn’t get a chance to visit this year, we’d encourage you to plan for 2013!