Why Doesn’t NYC Have an Agriculture Show?

Paris, in its own haughty way, celebrates the regional bounty that creates its culinary arts. Why can’t New York follow suit?

A poignant and repeated question from @NYFarmer on X is to ask why New York City does not have an annual agricultural show like Paris.

For the last half century, the Paris International Agricultural Show has drawn farmers, breeders, producers, and a heady mix of industry and institutional players from across France and its territories. They put on a nine-day spectacular that draws in hundreds of thousands of visitors.

New York City, like Paris, is a huge imperial metropolis with a vast array of regional, national, and foreign farms feeding its insatiable appetite every day. Like any imperial city, it is possible to and perhaps likely to assume a generally haughty attitude to all those beyond its limits. New York and Paris can be found in the affirmative on this account. However, it does not necessarily follow that this haughtiness must be paired with contempt. Paris bears this out with its agriculture show. It is precisely the regional quality that is on display with its magnificent cattle, fatted sheep, vegetables, fruits, and cheeses. Paris might be proud of its discerning taste, but the quality originates firmly outside its boundaries.

What then does the lack of an agricultural show reveal about New York? New York does, after all, claim taste. The city boasts of its restaurants, its “food,” but here it claims the glory for itself. City promoters reserve their praise for a chef’s seemingly alchemical transformation of foodstuff (arriving from some misty grey beyond) into photo worthy dishes ideally consumed primarily by the eye, and if necessary, by a secondary (often disappointing) consumption by the body.

Perhaps for many decades we could characterize this as imperial indifference to these mere food producers. But in the last decade and half, and even more acutely in recent years, this indifference has clearly become contemptuous. At gilded level of City Hall, farmers—with the exception of a few “urban” farms growing wilted “hydroponic” lettuce on rooftops—are at best inconvenient to think about, and at worst cast as the enemies of the newly imagined civilization it believes to be concocting. In their scheme, sanitized “labs” and great machines out in the lifeless terrain of endless mono crop “fields” will harvest the new foodstuff needed to make the “Plant-Based” ingredients for New York’s chefs and cooks to practice their magical craft upon. An agricultural show in NYC with the reality of actual animals, farm products and the farmers themselves, would rebuke and repudiate this imperial contempt and the fantastical unreality on which its claims rest.

A perusal of the archive indicates that once upon a time, for a period of two to three years, New York did have such a show. In 1911, the first “Land Show” (as it was called) brought together breeders, producers, and farmers from the region and attracted a hundred thousand visitors to see the best of the country’s offerings on display at the old Madison Square Garden. The second (and perhaps final?) Land Show was in 1912 at the 71st Regiment Armory in Murray Hill (now gone) and attracted nearly a million visitors over nine days of events. This included “milkmaids in appropriate costumes attending to their duties”, lectures on every agricultural topic imaginable at each hour of the day, and the great chance to sample what American farmers could produce.

Despite the delusion in today’s City Hall, New York’s actual chefs, cooks, and restaurants are aware of, work with, and care deeply for our regional farmers. Even the city itself has propagated its own counter motif of care and cultivation for farmers over the last many decades with its Greenmarket programs, which brings over 200 farms to the city’s 48 market locations which something like a quarter million New Yorkers visit each week.

That is to say we have a historical and archival basis to pair with muted yet powerful current of care for our farms and farmers which compels to imagine, hope and work for a new “Land Show” in which our haughty pride can openly acknowledge on the great work, beauty, and truth outside our borders on which it rests.

EDITOR’S TAKE:

Excellent point! Would it be too much to ask for one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world to take the time to recognize and honor agriculture? After all,  agriculture has the amazing ability to produce enough food and fiber for America and also overseas customers. The author is right, if a haughty city like Paris can do it, why can’t NYC? Food and agriculture can bring people together. Farmers/ranchers could learn firsthand what consumers in NYC are demanding and NYC consumers could learn what farmers are doing to produce safe, sustainable and reasonably priced food. How about that – a win-win! Speaking of recognizing agriculture – be sure to start thinking of ways you might help us celebrate Ag Day 2025 on March 18^th. That also is the date of the Certified Ag Group’s AgRally 2025. In conjunction with RFD-TV and the Cowboy Channel, with John Deere as the title sponsor, we recognize and celebrate farmers/ranchers by using local and national programming. Interested? Give us a call…