New ‘beef barn’ coming to Butler Farm Show grounds prior to 2025 event
Visitors to this year’s Butler Farm Show in Connoquenessing Township may notice something that wasn’t there last year: a brand-new barn which will be used to house cattle exhibits, dubbed the “beef barn.”
The new barn will provide solid cover for those attending the cattle exhibits, and will replace the array of rented tents that the fair used in years past.
“It’s basically for the market beef and the open beef show,” said Ken Metrick, a member of the Butler Farm Show board. “All the beef cattle will be under one roof.”
Metrick says that the new barn has been a gleam in the show’s eye for a decade and a half, but could not come to fruition until this year.
“It takes a lot of planning, and it takes money, like everything else,” Metrick said. “We’re always upgrading and building things as we see fit.”
Both Metrick and fellow board member Jimmy Govan credit the initial idea for the new barn to late Farm Show board member Elmer Colteryahn. After Colteryahn’s passing in 2018, Govan took on the idea of eventually constructing the new barn.
“Three years ago, I took it under my wing with the permission of the board,” Govan said. “I jumped through all the hoops that I needed to jump through to get it started.”
Govan says the last straw was when a major storm ran through the farm show in a recent year.
“We have kids that are exhibiting their animals and their projects in tents, and a couple of years ago, we had a bad storm roll through, and it blew a tent down on the exhibits and the kids and everything else,” Govan said. “And we determined that we want to put these kids all in solid buildings as soon as we can.”
According to Govan, the initial idea was to connect the new barn to the already-existing livestock barn, which hosts numerous exhibits during the farm show. However, this introduced some complications that would have made building the new barn unaffordable, and ultimately delayed its construction.
“If we connected the buildings together, the fire suppression system for the combined area would have been over $250,000 just for that,” Govan said. “That’s what deterred it for so long. It would have been cost-prohibitive.”
The beef barn currently under construction is not connected to the livestock barn, and under state law, is small enough to not require a fire suppression system.
After the 15 years it took for the project to get off the ground, Metrick estimates that it will take two months for the barn to finish construction, followed by some additional time for landscaping.
“I would say probably by early June it should be ready to go,” Metrick said.
Metrick says that the beef barn is the first major addition for the Butler Farm Show ground in decades, when the grandstands for the demolition derby track were installed piece by piece over several years during the 1990s.
