Minnesota State Fair Day One: Agricultural Building & Crop Art

We headed to the Agricultural Building.  It’s a great Art Deco monolith.  You’ll see it from above later.

Pike Schemes never misses a head-in-the-hole opportunity.  Sara and I partook.  Shawn captured us nicely, I think.  (Until I set up this post, I had no idea what the front of this display looked like.)

There were other agriculture props for us.

Corn.  And some winning corn.

We stood in line to see the Crop Art.  I didn’t even know it was a thing, but boy, is it a thing.  There are rules (only seeds that can produce a crop in Minnesota) and anyone who enters will have their work displayed.  There is even a category for out-of-state people. I noticed Portland author Cathy Camper’s had a piece entered.  I had no idea she did crop art.

There were a lot of political themes.  You can see how the artists had to also display a key of what made up their seed art.

I thought this one had the best use of  a hashtag.

These shoes seemed to be an example of seed art gone wrong. (Sorry Susan.)

Some of them looked more like paintings, like that one of Buster Keaton.  And it’s always nice to see RBG in the house.

This intricate entry caused a lot of cheery commentary.

Sweet Martha’s Cookies are only available at the fair. (And apparently, three other events.)  The lines are long. They come in a bucket, lovingly rendered here, in seed art form. More amazing crop art.

My favorite was this map of Minnesota authors.

Here was another well-done political seed art.

Aside from a variety of scarecrows, there were also vintage feed sacks to look at.

Also, the bathrooms in the Agriculture building were great. There was a woman working the door, who would monitor stall usage and tell the first person in line which stall to go to.  This meant no looking under the stalls or wandering about.  Very efficient!

In the Minnesota Fruit section was my one of my favorite fair items.

Frozen cider!  Inexpensive and so delicious!  I bought one the next day, too.