P3 NEWS
Hank the Tank, Sticky Dots, and the Future of Pickaway County
Fair Story · July 1, 2026
The county fair was the perfect place to talk about what this land means — and where it’s headed.
The Pickaway County Fair is a lot of things at once: competition and reunion, tradition and spectacle, fried food and fresh air. It’s also, as it turns out, a pretty good place to talk about the future of agriculture and how we use our land.
That’s why the Pickaway Progress Partnership (P3) set up a booth at this year’s fair — not just to share information, but to listen. Fairgoers stopped by throughout the week to learn about the ongoing Future of Agriculture Study and the county’s first-ever Land Use Plan, flip through display panels, and weigh in on what they want Pickaway County to look like for the next generation.
Visitors were invited to put stickers on posters highlighting preliminary ideas from the planning process — a quick, tactile way to signal what resonated. They also filled out cards with their own suggestions and priorities.
That kind of hands-on engagement reflects where the planning process is right now: a vision and framework have taken shape after more months of community engagement and public meetings, but the work of refining and finalizing recommendations continues. The committee will keep meeting in the months ahead, engaging with township trustees, local citizens, farmers, landowners, and others as the plans move toward completion.
The fair booth panels laid out the stakes clearly. Pickaway County is 88% farmland — about 283,000 acres across 760 farms — generating roughly $250 million in annual agricultural market value. But the county lost 13,800 acres of farmland between 2017 and 2022, the average farmer is 59 years old, and central Ohio’s rapid growth is pushing development pressure southward. At the same time, volatile export markets, rising input costs, and corporate consolidation are squeezing farm economics.
The planning process — which has engaged more than 400 participants including farmers, agri-business owners, students, public officials, and longtime residents — produced a guiding vision: a Pickaway County where agriculture is diversified, resilient, localized, and accessible for future generations of farmers. Three themes frame the work ahead: managing growth, stewarding the land, and encouraging prosperity.
One thing the planning team was clear about at the booth: the Land Use Plan is not county-wide zoning, and it does not override the authority of townships and municipalities. Townships control their own zoning decisions. The county-level plan is advisory — a shared framework and practical guide to help decision-makers, farmers, businesses, and residents plan together for growth that protects what makes Pickaway County distinctive.
As P3 Executive Director Brian Hill put it: “This process is about making sure the community is in the driver’s seat — deciding together how we grow, where we grow, and how we protect the agricultural land and rural character that define this county.”
No fair story would be complete without at least one grand champion, and this year’s had a memorable one.
Kimber Cook — a young exhibitor making her mark at the fair — won the Grand Champion Feeder Calf title for the second year in a row. Her steer, the aptly named Hank the Tank, drew plenty of admirers near the “Future of Agriculture” booth.
