Aug. 4, 2025
For many students from the University of Missouri’s College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, a highlight of their childhood summers was attending the Missouri State Fair. Whether they were exhibiting livestock or 4-H projects, or helping in the FFA building, memories were made every August in Sedalia, Missouri.
The 11-day agriculture expo hosts thousands of people from across the state each summer, from both inside and outside the agricultural community. An event of that size takes a large team to execute — and many CAFNR students make the transition from exhibitors to event staff at an early age.
Lane Falch grew up showing sheep with 4-H and FFA at the state fair. After graduating from Mizzou in May with a degree in animal sciences, he went to work fulltime as manager of the university’s Rocheford Turkey Research Farm. When Bryon Wiegand, director of the Division of Animal Sciences, offered him the opportunity to be superintendent of this year’s state fair poultry barn, Falch jumped at the chance to learn a new facet of livestock exhibiting.
“It’s a way different ballgame than a sheep show,” he said. “The poultry show is a sanctioned show with the American Poultry Association and the American Bantam Association, so we have to have licensed judges, and all score sheets and results have to be sent in to the associations for them to track the yearly standings for individual birds. So, it’s a lot different from a technical standpoint, but very much the same environment I grew up loving.”
Falch knew he would need help managing the poultry barns, so he recruited Emma and Tess Bauer, sisters and CAFNR students. Emma Bauer, an incoming senior, is studying animal sciences, while Tess Bauer, an incoming freshman, is pursuing agricultural education. While the sisters showed poultry at their county fair, they spent most of their time at the state fair exhibiting other projects in the 4-H building and watching their dad participate in tractor pulls.
Kristin Rieke, a senior majoring in animal sciences, will serve as the assistant beef superintendent at the state fair. Although she was raised on a beef cattle farm, Rieke exhibited sheep through FFA during her years as a state fair participant. She gained experience in the show cattle arena by helping her father, an agricultural education teacher, with the beef show at their local county fair. That experience inspired her to seek an internship last year with the National Western Stock Show, where she cut her teeth on the behind-the-scenes work of large shows.
“I was really excited to get offered the opportunity to be the assistant beef cattle superintendent this year,” Rieke said. “Cattle shows just feel like a second home at this point. You meet cool people with cool stories, and it almost feels like family, even if you haven’t met them before.”
While Falch, Rieke and the Bauer sisters are wrangling beef and poultry, Claire Walker, a senior majoring in agribusiness management, will be across the fairgrounds, handing off her title as Missouri State Fair Queen to a new pageant participant.
The Missouri State Fair Queen is chosen from a group of young women interested in representing agriculture and the fair across the fairgrounds for the duration of the state fair.
Walker had attended the state fair as a livestock exhibitor in 4-H and FFA, so she had spent more time on the fairgrounds in jeans and boots than in an evening gown. She’d never entered a pageant of any kind before her county fair pageant.
“I was more comfortable, knowing that instead of a traditional pageant, this is about agriculture,” Walker said. “This is about a place where I have interned all summer, where I visited and have shown at multiple years. This is where I grew up. So being able to serve in that role kind of felt like a homecoming. I was doing the same thing I’d done at the state fair before, in that I was representing agriculture, but my outfit was just a little different.”
While they might be serving in different roles, all five of these CAFNR students and young alumni acknowledge the privilege they have to serve in a leadership position at such a young age, an opportunity unique to the agricultural industry.
“I think it’s truly industry specific in the way that agriculture encourages the youth to be the people that are stepping up,” Walker said. “They know that we’re going to be the next generation of farmers, of advocates, of the people in this industry, and so they’re making sure that we are prepared young. They want you to be able to have the skill set to advocate for the industry and share your stories, and they give you real-world opportunities, like the State Fair, to practice those skills.”
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