Exhibition associations have long been a part of communities across the Canadian Prairies.
Most started around the idea of hosting annual fairs, a place for farmers and homemakers to bring their best to show against the best of their neighbours.
Winning a red ribbon for a Clydesdale stallion, Hereford bull, or a jar of dill pickles or a sample of garden red potatoes all meant the same thing: Huge smiles of success and some bragging rights at the local coffee shop.
For those uninclined to show their best, the fairs were, and remain, a place to gather for a day of fun.
Increasingly though the desire and time to prepare and exhibit has waned, and events once attracting dozens of cattle and horses and jars of jam, struggle to keep that aspect of a fair going.
The Yorkton Exhibition Association has gone through the trending cycle. Barns once filled with draft horses, dairy and beef cattle, hogs and sheep, now sit empty, and the YEA has to be innovative to keep farming a major part of their mandate.
Over the years they have been innovative in that approach, taking on events through the year from llama shows to workshop days on canola.
And now they are embarking on a new project, one focused on educating youth and consumers about the crop of oats.
Through a partnership which includes the provincial Ministry of Agriculture, Grain Millers and the Prairie Oat Growers, the YEA is creating a short video following the humble oat from the farm field, through the production mill, to the store and onto the consumer’s table.
What makes this particular video project so exciting is that while a standard version will be available, so too will a 3D version allowing viewers using special headwear technology to enter the video as a virtual world.
To engage youth in particular, the ability to enter a virtual world would seem an ideal way to do it.
The film, being shot this fall for release on various online platforms and through classroom and trade show showings, will release in the new year.
The idea is one which speaks to the YEA’s willingness to try something new, a must in a changing world for agricultural exhibitions.
If the film proves to be a success, and education is almost always a success, then the possibilities are endless. Applying the same technology to honey production, canola, the making of a pizza as it relates to farm products, organic production, or aerial application of form protection products are but a few ideas which come to mind as possible future endeavours.
Calvin Daniels is Editor with Yorkton This Week.
