From barns to box office: Central Wisconsin State Fair posts strong numbers

MARSHFIELD – During its Nov. 11 meeting, the Marshfield Common Council heard a report on the 2025 Central Wisconsin State Fair (CWSF) from CWSF Executive Director Dale Christiansen.

“When you're talking about the fair, it centers around the weather, as we've got a six-day outdoor event. We were blessed this year with some beautiful weather. We got a lot of rain on Sunday prior to it, kind of hampered some of the 4-H kids getting their barns ready and getting things put together,” he said.

“Minimal showers on Sunday morning, the last day of the fair; but other than that, everything went well.”

Christiansen said that the fair’s online presence has grown over the past few years.

 “We had over 58,000 people that go to our website and this year and looked at things with over 236,000 page views. Our Facebook page has got over 15,000 followers, and that has gone up a lot over the last several years,” he explained.

Christiansen said that this year’s fair attendance landed at 62,000.

“We went back and searched our online ticket sales; we sold tickets to our grandstand shows to 26 different states. I'm pretty sure those people weren't going home for the night. So I'm hoping that a lot of that stayed here in our hotels, and helped the local economy out this year,” he added.

“This year, we had 1,096 Junior Fair exhibitors, and with that, they showed 3,825 different exhibits. With that, the premiums paid out to those junior fair members were over $10,000 this year. Our open fair exhibitors were at 524; our open fair exhibits were 2,629.

Christiansen said the fair expenses landed at $830,000, which included the ground/grandstand acts at $374,000, tent rental and stage, sound, light and other equipment at $94,000, fair insurance at $43,000 and $34,000 in advertising.

“With our upgrade in our bands and our entertainment, we had to do quite a lot of changing with security, and our security doubled over what it has been in the past, but I’ve got to say, they did an excellent job and everything pulled off fine. We did not have any incidents,” he said.

On the income side of things, Christiansen said the carnival was down by $2,000.

“In talking with them, a lot of that reasoning would be the some of it was the economy. They're noticing that as the families come up to buy tickets at the booth, they were limiting how many tickets they could use, that type of thing. We had very low numbers on our Wednesday and Thursday night carnivals and Friday night, we hit about average. What we did Saturday night was phenomenal. Saturday and Saturday evenings were very phenomenal,” he recalled.

Food and craft vendors netted $58,000, and grandstand and gate revenue of $550,000.

“That's over and above what we did last year. Our income this year was $975,000 from this year's fair,” he said.

“One thing that we're working on now is we are working on doing an economic impact study. I don't have any numbers from the Marshfield area, but I do have a few interesting numbers as we became part of what the state association was doing.

“This year, Wisconsin fairs had 2.3 million visitors statewide, or 33% of the population of Wisconsin attended the Wisconsin county fair — $595.5 million of economic impact on the local economy, and $13.5 million total fiscal impact on state sales tax and revenues.

“I'm very interested in seeing what our numbers are going to look like when we get back. We're working with the same consulting firm, and that should be coming here shortly.”

Christiansen said that they have already begun working on next year’s fair.

“I've got to tell you, the entertainment cost has not gone down, and [I’m] a little bit leery when you're having national acts wanting $125,000 and $150,000 to be signing those types of contracts now with the economy, I’m not sure what it might be come next August,” he said.

He said that fair staff was also working on updating the website and  that the grounds are getting a lot of bookings in the upcoming months, including the Wisconsin Allis Chalmers Tractor Club who is scheduled to come in January.