Every August our Bond County rural community loves to love up the young livestock show youth.  During the County Fair the show animals are auctioned off in an interesting combination of bragging rights (for who purchased – bid the highest price) – for so and so’s son or daughter’s show animal.  Sometimes it is local businesses, or elected officials, bidding against each other to get into the local news and hearts of the community.

If a steer or barrow is not a high enough price, it is not uncommon community members, not connected to the youth, to simply bid the price up to validate the work of the young livestock handler.  In those situations, it often means the Good Samaritan also gets the winning bid and brings home thousands of dollars of an animal they didn’t plan to buy.

There are stories that are best known within the local show community. Struggles with health or finance.  One young show person this year was recovering from a serious illness, and it was announced that half of her earnings would go to research on her illness.  Top dollar, always!  In 2023, the young seller of the grand champion barrow donated the auction proceeds to offset medical expenses. That pig was sold 3 times, with each buyer donating it back to the auction. Total raised for those medical expenses for a pig with a market value of $165, was $27,000.

This year, 2025, the community joyously threw $105,000 at the young folks showing 14, 1,300 lb. steers and 16, 245 lb. barrows.  Most of that went to the steers that are 5 times larger than the barrows.  Beef prices are higher than normal this year, $2.35/pound.  But the community bid up the steer prices at an average of $4.54/pound, with a high price of $5.75/lb.

The barrows were similar, but smaller animals.  This year’s market price was $0.70/pound and the community bid that up to an average price of $6.04/lb.  The high price for barrows was $7.50/lb.  That is a 10-fold increase over the market price of pork.  The high price was paid for a local political leader and in another case, a new restaurant that is opening soon.

The average community price premium over the market price for the steers and barrows at the county junior livestock show the last five years was 3.5 times over the market price.  The youth also show sheep, goats, poultry, rabbits, and dairy products, but the prices reported here are just for beef and hogs.  But it is not for the animals.  This sale is all about supporting the community youth!

This is one facet of our County Fair.  This sort of unbridled community support for local community members has many flavors across the entire fair.  The thing that fascinates me is that these internal, local flows of volunteer hours and premiums paid, are difficult to quantify in the publicly available datasets.  As a result, they are poorly understood outside of the people actually participating in the events themselves.  But these activities happen in the thousands of counties across the United States.

Local communities, local rural communities in particular, are successful in ways that generally do not show up in the larger populations in urban areas.  They are part of the secret life of rural communities.