St Jean Farm Days is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year.
The event takes place January 8th and 9th at the St. Jean Centennial Hall.
Organizer Brunel Sabourin said his parents were part of the original organizing committee 35 years ago. The event was started in conjunction with Manitoba Agriculture. He says they are now seeing a third generation of volunteers helping to run the show.
St. Jean Farm Days is known as being the unofficial start of the farm show season.
"This year we're going to be talking a lot about the late season/wet fall that we had and what it's going to look like for next spring because not a lot of fertilizer went down last fall, so it's going to potentially cause some logistics issue come spring time and there's a lot of fields that got rutted up with the high rainfall that we got," said Sabourin. "We're going to be dealing with compaction issues and cleaning up those ruts, putting fertilizer down."
As always, the speaker list also includes weather and market outlooks.
Sabourin says they're maxed out at about 60 exhibitor booths with attendance usually ranging anywhere from a low of 80 people to as high as 130, which they saw recently. Close to 20 volunteers help to make the event a success every year.
He notes admission prices have gone up this year.
"This year will be the first year that we've raised our price since the beginning. All 35 years so far it was $6 entry at the door or $10 for couples. For this year we've raised the price to $10 for everyone just to make things easier. We're hoping to be able to make a donation to STARS Ambulance with the proceeds."
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