Exhibit Farm Highlights: Our Favorite Summer Projects
We’ve been busy this summer, and we already have a lot to show for it. This spring, we made quite a collection of new connections with ag groups looking to spice up their public presence. Some of them were in-state. Some of them were halfway across the country.
Regardless of where our customers come from, though, it’s cool to see how much the messages that they want to share have in common. They may be separated by hundreds of miles and by differences in their specific agricultural industries, but all of these groups share the same need to connect with the consumers that their industries feed. And we’d like to think that we’ve helped them do that through our unique agricultural education products.
Here are a few of our highlights so far from this summer.
Tabletop Dairy Cow Display
Probably the smallest of our summer projects, this cute little dairy cow display is the latest addition to the Juneau County Dairy Promotion Council’s collection. The Juneau County Dairy Promotion Council first contacted us back in the spring, expressing a need for a display. This display, they said, would serve as a tool to use at promotional events in order to promote dairy farming in their community. Such events would include gatherings at their county fair, community suppers, and farm tours. While the council wanted something interactive, they also wanted to keep it simple. It had to be interesting enough to get the attention of both kids and adults without being overly time consuming.
By the beginning of July, after brainstorming ideas and creating concepts, we had built an interactive dairy cow. We knew that this display would have to be portable. That’s why we kept it small. But we also used some of our expert engineering to decrease the weight of the materials we used. We fabricated some subtle metal stands to give the display some firm support against bumps and nudges. Small enough to sit on a tabletop and lightweight enough to be easily transported, this 2D display incorporates a rotating wheel of fun facts and lifting panels with dairy Q&A.
Lifelike Soybean Plant Replicas
The Michigan Soybean Promotion Committee saw our past work with artificial soybean plants and decided that they needed some plants of their own. So they made a custom order for a set of soybean plants showing four stages in the soybean growth process. And, a little later, they added an order for a hideously diseased plant displaying several soybean sicknesses. Both of these orders would become some of our favorite summer Exhibit Farm projects.
Our craftsmen and painters got cranking with their plant work. They molded fake soybean pods, painted leaves, engineered various ways to display the disorders, and imitated the soybean plant fuzz—all the while studying actual soybean plants in an effort to keep their models as accurate and realistic as possible.
The results were rather incredible. The plants we delivered to the Michigan Soybean Promotion Committee could pretty much pass as the real thing. Now, stored in their nice little cases, the plants will serve as educational tools to the committee as they seek to teach consumers and growers alike about one of the nation’s top crops. This is all thanks to the incredible attention to detail displayed by our team of craftsmen. They may not grow many soybean plants of their own, but they sure know how to make them. All they need is the right materials.
Barrel Battle Trivia Game
The third of our favorite summer Exhibit Farm projects is an addition to some of our past work. Back in 2013, AgroLiquid Fertilizers opened their museum-style agriculture exhibit in their St. Johns, Michigan, headquarters facility. The contents of this exhibit were the product of months of our hard work and creativity. Thanks to the care AgroLiquid puts into their exhibit, the AgroLiquid IQhub is still in good shape today. In fact, it’s even growing. Several months ago, the AgroLiquid staff let us know that they wanted us to build an additional interactive display to add to their already large collection. This interactive element, they said, would be used to reinforce some of the facts presented in the Liebig’s Barrel display.
So we got our creative concept director on the job, and he came up with an interactive trivia game that incorporates the theme of barrels all while teaching about plant nutrients. The unit itself is barrel-shaped, and the game keeps score by raising or lowering the staves of each player’s barrel. Players earn points by answering the trivia questions on the screen. They do this by selecting a button to match their answers. With every point that a player wins, a stave of his barrel on the screen grows higher. The first person with a complete barrel is the winner. With fun graphics and informational trivia, this Barrel Battle game is sure to engage IQhub visitors of all ages.
And that’s not all we’ve worked on this summer. To stay on up of our latest Exhibit Farm projects, follow us on Instagram @exhibitfarm!
