Commodity Carnival at the Clark County Fair, Part 1
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2016 -- 9:30 AM
-A Commodity Carnival will be held during the Clark County Fair next week.CME Group and the National 4-H Council have partnered for the fourth year to bring the Commodity Carnival to the state’s fairs and carnivals. They will be setup at this year’s Clark County Fair to help teach youth lessons and agriculture, business and the economy. I spoke with Pam Hobson of the 4-H Wisconsin Extension and she explained what the Commodity Carnival is.
"So, a Commodity Carnival is a booth at the county fair. And in that booth, we have what we call our 'pigs' and we're going to raise our pigs from a baby pig up to market weight. And what we do is we work with the kids, and our pig is a little pink egg, and we talk about the inputs that it takes to raise that pig such as we'll put feed into it. We'll talk about energy costs. We'll talk about cost of housing. We'll also talk about if you're pig gets sick they might have to go to the veterinarian and all those kinds of things."
"And then what we do is we weigh their pig and we have the amount of it corresponds to what the weight of that pig would be if they were going to sell it. And then we give them a little disk and they get to put it down the plinko board and at the bottom of the plinko board there's a bunch of numbers down there and it gets to tell us that when you sell your pig if you break even, if you make money on it or even if you lose money on your pig. So, the goal, of course, is to make money on your pig that you're going to sell and so then they get a prize depending on if the broke even or if they lost money. But everybody gets a prize in the end."
Coming up on Thursday, Pam will explain what the 4-H hopes kids will take away from the carnival.
Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.