Wisconsin Farm Technology Days, Keeping People Safe
Wednesday, June 13th, 2018 -- 12:22 PM
-In less than a month, the 2018 Wisconsin Farm Technology Days will get underway in Wood County.The event, happening from 9am-4pm, July 10th-12th at D&B Sternweis Farms, along with Weber’s Farm Store-Heiman’s Holsteins, on County Highway H near Marshfield, will feature over 600 exhibitors, innovation square, field demonstrations, virtual farm tours, delicious food and much more.
The large variety of events and the building of, essentially, a small city in the middle of a field takes a large group of committee members and volunteers to make everything happen. During the recent Media Day for the event, I spoke with Lieutenant Charlie Hoogesterger, of the Wood County Sheriff’s Department and a member of the Traffic and Safety Committee for Farm Tech Days, and he talked about how his team will be handling safety during the event.
"With the amount of people that are going to be coming into the show, potentially 60,000 like it was in Marathon County in 2011, in could present some problems in security. So, what we do, is we've got several teams that will be patrolling the grounds from the Sheriff's Department, State Patrol, DCI and some other agencies. They'll come and make sure that everything is going smoothly and there are no issues. If anything does come up, we've been doing some table top exercises to figure out how we're going to address some of these issues. It's been three years of planning, so we've got a lot of ideas how we're going to handle certain situations."
He also talked about how they will handle traffic on the day of the show.
"Potentially 7,000 vehicles a day arriving within 2-3 hours in the morning and then all leaving at the same time 2-3 hours in the afternoon. We've got the Wisconsin State Patrol, the Department of Transportation, the County Highway Department, the Town of Lincoln Highway Department, the Sheriff's Department. We've even reached out as far as Marathon County, Clark County, other agencies, City of Marshfield and their law enforcement teams to help plan that as well, in case we do start having some backups or an accident. We can work with those guys to get the traffic pattern shifted. So, it's been an experience. It's been a lot of fun planning it. You get to meet a lot of new people, so it's been a great event."
Once again, Farm Technology Days is happening from 9am-4pm, July 10th-12th at D&B Sternweis Farms, along with Weber’s Farm Store-Heiman’s Holsteins, on County Highway H near Marshfield.
Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.