Projected record-setting crowds help close out Farm Show

(Harrisburg) -- The crowds may have cleared out from the 97th Annual Pennsylvania Farm Show, but event officials say they've left their mark in a big way.

Patrick Kerwin is the executive director of the Farm Show Complex and Expo Center in Harrisburg. He says he expects the show to draw in more attendees than ever before, including last year, when 400,000 people flocked to the event billed as the country's largest indoor agricultural show.

Kerwin says he thinks this year's focus on locally-produced foods and products is just one reason behind the large turnout. "I think the new exhibits, also some of the new features that are here, help to draw people, but so do the old favorites, of course. So, it's a combination."

Kerwin says favorable weather for the last week or so could also have attracted more people, like Pat Nickett from Bucks County. She'd visited for the first time in several years and had a number of items on her Farm Show "bucket list," of sorts. "Some of the machinery. Animals, especially. And food, right? Food!"

This year's event closed yesterday and featured more than 6,000 animals, a grape-stomping competition, and new foods, like pumpkin funnel cake.