The Rural We: Nena Johnson
The director of the NY State Sheep & Wool Festival tells us what visitors can expect to find this year.
Knitters, fiber vendors, and sheep buyers and sellers will be thrilled to know that the New York State Sheep & Wool Festival is mostly returning to its regular Dutchess County Fairgrounds site after last year’s all-digital version. The annual extravaganza of wool will be a combination of on-site events and shopping, and online offerings October 16-17. Nena Johnson, the festival’s director since 2018, tells us what to expect now that the beloved event is baa-ack for its 41st year.
I lived in the Westchester area but gradually moved my way north. I ran the Growing Farmers Initiative at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture and worked as an independent consultant with farmers and farm businesses when I was living in Red Hook. My interest in farming stems from my mother, who was from Ecuador. She inherited her family’s dairy farm that goes way back to the 1880s. I spend a few months a year on the farm in the Andes of Ecuador. In 2013 I pursued an MBA in Advanced Farm Management at the Royal Agricultural University in England. I now live in Texas, where I run the farmers markets in Austin, but I’ll be coming up soon in preparation for the Festival.
I am an avid knitter and love fiber art, but my interest in the Sheep and Wool Festival came from the livestock side. Friends of mine had been vendors and heard they were looking for a new festival director. Getting the position seemed an even better way to cement myself in the community of producers in the region.
The Festival was all virtual last year, and on the whole, people enjoyed it. This year it’s a hybrid event. The workshops, demonstrations and breed talks will be held online. We’ve pared back a lot of in-person events. It’ll be mostly vendors, the sheep show, and the equipment auction. There’ll be 180 vendors, but that’s not much less than we usually have. We’ve redone the layout to allow more space for shoppers to spread out. We’re also offering virtual vendors, with a Zoom linkup for them to offer shopping and browsing experiences. We'll still have food vendors, and the fleece show and sale on site.
Typically, we’ve had 30,000 visitors, but this year we’ve limited ticket sales to 10,000 each day, with the hope and expectation that it won’t feel like the crush it usually does. And ticket sales will only be online.
We’re a little trepidatious, taking whatever precautions we feel like we can. Everybody’s ready to come back. Whether COVID is ready for us, we’ll see.
