By KATLAN THOMERSON
Glasgow News 1
As part of a feasibility study conducted by Agriculture Researcher Jason Peake, seven area farmers and Barren County Judge-Executive Jamie Bewley Byrd met recently to discuss the practicality of building an agriculture exposition center in Barren County.
Currently, the center is set to be a partnership between Cave City and Glasgow, according to Byrd. It is anticipated to be built near the Cave Area Conference Center, but as of now, nothing has been finalized.
“There’s a major need in Kentucky for easy access of a facility that meets the needs of activities in agriculture,” said beef producer Gary Tilghman.
Tilghman is also the former agriculture extension agent for Barren County. There were a series of four meetings at the UK Barren County Extension office in Glasgow on Monday, Jan. 22. Each focused on a different group that might have an interest in an agriculture exposition center in Barren County. Tilghman attended the one focused on farmers.
The conversations were guided by nine questions written by Peake who was invited to serve as a neutral party who compiles information and presents his findings as part of the process for applying for grant money.
The majority of the discussion focused on design. Many attendees mentioned agriculture centers in Casey County and Louisville as reference points in terms of how they visualize what the new facility may look like.
“We base everything off of Casey County, but we want a little more,” said dairy farmer H.H. Barlow.
As is, Barren County agriculturist struggle with finding a place that is easy to access and is built to best assist farmers in storing and preparing their animals while they’re attending events and showings at a center.
While discussing cons, many attendees stressed the importance of staffing. Byrd explained the current staffing structure of the Cave City Convention Center to describe how she envisions the organization will function.
“We want to make it all one mega-complex,” Byrd said, “The convention center has two to three people who work full-time, and I can see adding on two to three people full time and the rest would be contract work.”
The new center is set to be an extension of the Cave Area Conference Center that will be open to public rental when it is not being used for agriculture events. Concerts, pageants, farmers markets, and car shows are a few of the events that the attendees expect will utilize the space.
As they continued to discuss cons, Peake mentioned an issue that may make it difficult to secure funding,
“States usually don’t like strictly regional impacts because if you’re just drawing people from Bowling Green or Elizabethtown or wherever and you’re pulling them over here, it doesn’t have a net positive on the state. You’re just rearranging where things happen within the state,” he said.
As a rebuttal, the agriculturalists agreed that because Barren County is centrally located between two major airports, they predict that many people will come from out of state to participate in their showings and events.
The feasibility study is predicted to be finished by late February, at which point it will be sent to Frankfort for review.
Read about the meeting that included government officials here.
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