County fairs are struggling to get funds from urban legislators; some fairs are forced to cancel

County fairs are facing a crisis and getting little support from urban politicians. "The number of U.S. farms has dropped six straight years, and with them demand for entertainments that convened growers who spend much of the year in their fields," Elizabeth Campbell reports for Bloomberg. "With state budgets under pressure and industrial agriculture helping to drain the countryside’s population, urban legislators face tough choices. Illinois cut support for county fairs by 38 percent as attendance fell by almost a third from 2000 to 2013."

As a results, events like the Macon County Fair, which has been a staple in central Illinois for 158 years, was canceled and replaced with a scaled-down festival, Campbell writes. "Rural and small-town America face a 'growing demographic challenge,' according to a November 2013 report by the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service. Macon County hasn’t been spared. Its population fell 1.3 percent from April 2010 to July 2013, while the state’s grew 0.4 percent." (Campbell photo: Ride at the Macon County fairgrounds)

Funding for Illinois’s 104 county fairs has fallen from $8.16 million in 2000 to $5.07 million in 2013, Campbell writes. Similar numbers have been reported in other states. Dominic Vivona Jr., a controller at Amusements of America, a carnival operator based in Florence, S.C., that serves 30 to 40 fairs a year, told Campbell, “It’s definitely not atypical. It’s a common occurrence throughout the country.” (Read more)