At the 2025 Oklahoma City Farm Show, Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays visited with John Riles of Midwest Farm Shows.
The Oklahoma City Farm Show is the final event of the organization’s 2024 – 2025 show season, and despite, or perhaps because of, rainy weather, the show has a great turnout on this Thursday afternoon.
Midwest Farm Shows’s season begins around Thanksgiving with the Peoria Farm Show in Central Illinois. The Tulsa Farm Show takes place in early December, followed by the Dakota Farm Show in South Dakota and the Sioux Falls Farm Show both in January. The Hawkeye Farm Show in Cedar Falls, Iowa, comes next in February. The season finishes with the Oklahoma City Farm Show going on now until Saturday, April 5, at State Fair Park.
Midwest Farm Shows was begun in 1979 by Riles’s father along with some business partners. “It’s been forty plus years, doing these shows,” Riles said. “Our oldest running show is the show in Peoria. That started in 1980.”
He noted that farm shows of old were based on gathering information when information wasn’t so easy to get, so brochures were the popular items more so than the latest technology on equipment; however, some things haven’t changed.
“Obviously, you can get a lot more things online, now, but you still have that person-to-person selling and talking about what you need and what is in stock and when can you take delivery,” Riles pointed out. “Those are important things to talk about when you are making that buying decision. A lot of people will sell you something, then tell you after the fact that it might not show up for four, eight, or twelve weeks. It is good to talk to somebody directly and make sure that you are both on the same page of what the transaction is all about.”
Many of the items offered at the trade show are big-ticket items, making face-to-face transactions even more important. “There are a lot of deals to be had here as well,” Riley noted. “A lot of people time their visit to come on the last day of the show or come on the first day to scout what is going on, then come back on the last day to maybe get a little bit better price on that day, but they also run the risk of finding products sold out.”
He emphasized that it is a great event to enjoy camaraderie with fellow ag producers and the representatives of the companies that supply them.
The structure of the Bennet Event Center has allowed the Oklahoma City Farm Show to centralize into one building and provide both vendors and shoppers with an easier, more comfortable experience. Vendors responded with 94 new companies purchasing booths at this year’s event, but there is still room for more.
“We are looking to fill this thing from wall to wall and to get that done sometime in the next couple of years,” Riley commented.
In addition to the tradeshow, the Oklahoma City Farm Show also hosts various seminars offering information with a little entertainment and limitless networking and information gathering opportunities.
About what the future may look like for farms shows, Riles said, “As people lose some of these retail opportunities to engage, then coming to these events is a guaranteed place where you are going to see people, you are going to see products, and really plan your buying decisions so that is really the focus of our events.”
In 2026, the event is planned to be moved to March, nearer to the dates of the Oklahoma Youth Expo. Riles commented, “We are excited to be moving forward into March. We think that is better timing for our farmers in the area to give them a little better availability to get to the show. We’ve been running the show in April, and with Easter moving around so much, it has really forced us to move our dates. That’s not what you want when you are working with customers. You want to be steadier, so to move forward a couple of weeks and be adjacent to OYE provides the opportunity to keep us on some more solid dates.”
He hopes that the proximity of both events will be mutually beneficial. He stated, “Really, the investments into the fairgrounds here are what allow us to do that. They have a new arena that they will be opening soon, and obviously, this is a new expo building. They are both side by side. They have a lot of parking, so they really have what you need here to have a lot of quality events going on.”
More information about the Oklahoma City Farm Show can be found here.
