As the months roll on, more and more beloved activities and events in Pennsylvania have fallen by the wayside, pushed aside by efforts to control the coronavirus outbreak. Now, one of the state’s biggest planned events for 2021 is already suffering the consequences.
The state Department of Agriculture announced Wednesday that January’s Pennsylvania Farm Show, an event that annually attracts about a half million people to its home complex in Harrisburg, will be strictly a “virtual show.”
The department said that there would be no in-person events at all, and that details of the virtual event would be shared “over the coming weeks.”
“Virtual events will be focused on education and awareness for both the general public and the agriculture industry,” the department said in a news release. “Any competitive ag events that are held virtually will not require the purchase of an animal.”
The news from the Wolf administration comes on the heels of a number of other decisions that seek to reduce the spread of the virus, but that critics say have been announced and applied in an arbitrary fashion. The Farm Show announcement, like a recent suggestion by the governor to hold off on high school sports until 2021, attracted immediate criticism from state Republicans.
“Farmers and their families have sacrificed so much during this pandemic and they should not be punished as a result of the administration’s moving goalposts and shifting priorities,” Pennsylvania House Republican Caucus spokesperson Jason Gottesman said in a statement. “Pennsylvanians have sacrificed their lives and livelihoods in flattening the curve, building healthcare capacity, and mitigating the spread of COVID-19.”
Gottesman argued that the announcement in August was premature, given that there’s no telling this far out how safe or unsafe it might be to hold an event in January.
“At a time when statewide case numbers, hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19 continue to decline and vaccine development progresses at a rapid pace, the Wolf administration made a decision four months out to hold an all-virtual Farm Show without providing any justification or data to back up the notion that the situation on the ground will not be any different in January,” he said.
Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding, however, said the move to a virtual show was akin to letting a field be dormant for a season and necessary to avoid a calamity.
“There are times in the life of a farmer when the risks are too great or uncertain, requiring farmers to make the tough decision to leave a field fallow,” Redding said in a news release. “To protect our assets – both our people and our resources – from incalculable losses, we have made the tough decision to take a year to lie in fallow.”
