By BECKY KISER
Hays Post
“It’s sad,” said Ellis County Extension 4-H Youth Development Agent Susan Schlichting.
Kansas agriculture officials issued an order Tuesday prohibiting movement of Kansas poultry in an effort to prevent the spread of a devastating form of bird flu.
The order effectively cancels all poultry-related shows and events through the rest of this year. That includes the annual Ellis County Fair, July 11 to 18, at the Ellis County Fairgrounds.
Project leaders, barn superintendents and Ellis County Fair Board members are talking about options for actively engaging 4-H’ers who have poultry projects at the fair.
“We’ve talked about encouraging them to videotape their poultry project and that is something we could share at the fair or asking them to put together notebooks or displays about their birds. There are also poultry judging skill-a-thons,” Schlichting said.
The Ellis County Fair Board meets next Thursday, June 18.
“I think we need those decisions made fairly soon so the kids have plenty of time to get after them,” she added.
The timing of the Kansas Department of Agriculture order is poignant. The Ellis County 4-H poultry project participants just got their meat birds this past Saturday from Orscheln Farm and Home store in Hays.
“That’s one of the really fun things they do in the poultry project. Orscheln donates babies and the kids raise them up and learn how to care for them. They bring them to the fair and get to have them judged, get to sell them in the (livestock) sale — none of that will happen this year.”
There’s something else that won’t happen which Schlichting finds sad.
Colton Pfannenstiel, a member of the Good Hope 4-H Club and the son of fair board president Jill Pfannenstiel, is “very much into his poultry,” according to Schlichting.
“He got a harness for his chicken because he wanted to be able to walk his chicken around the fairgrounds,” she laughed. “So I’m sure he is just bummed.”
Schlichting said an email she got from the statewide 4-H office who “talked about them still having discussions of what they were going to do with the state fair.” The 2015 Kansas State Fair is Sept. 11-20 in Hutchinson.
“I’d written to the specialist and he indicated that at one point they talked about at least the meat pens–going in (the poultry) and showing and then going on to a packing plant and being processed immediately–but nothing has been decided,” she said.
No chickens will be shown in Ellis during the Ellis Jr. Free Fair in August, and that also means “no chicken-catching event,” according to Dena Patee, executive director of the Ellis Alliance.
“The fair board is already making plans for new events,” Patee said.