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Friday of our county fair features beef cattle shows — breeding, market and showmanship — as well as a special recognition event for kids who show beef breeding animals and the 4-H premium sale. In all, my older daughter showed four times on Friday, followed by walking her heifer through the breeding animal recognition and one of her steers in the premium sale. My younger daughter, in the Cloverbud program, showed once. It's a long, but special, day, capped off by the big event for the kids with market animals — the premium sale.

This year's sale featured high prices pretty across the board through every species. But I was reminded how you often can kind of tell the farm kids from the kids who aren't so connected to the farm based on the prices the animals bring.

Being a farm kid, we always had plenty of ag businesses to invite to the sale when I was growing up. During one particularly memorable sale, an employee of our farm co-op, on orders to buy "Jeff's kid's sheep," got into a bidding war with our ag banker, who had fun running up the price after realizing the co-op wasn't going to back down. My sheep ended up among the most expensive that year, and I couldn't stop grinning. Similarly, my daughter had one of the top-priced steers this year after a similar bidding war among ag businesses that we frequent.

It makes a ton of sense for ag businesses to support their customers' kids at premium sales. Not only is it good for building relationships and loyalty with the current customers, but it's also a good-will gesture toward the customers of tomorrow.

Now I'd like to put out a pitch for business — ag and otherwise — to consider supporting not just those well-connected farm kids at the premium sale but also the kids without those connections.

We talk a lot in agriculture about how we make up a tiny fraction of the general population. The agriculture community is aging — rapidly — and concerns persist about building up the next generation. But where, oh where, do you find the next generation of people who want to work in agriculture?

The premium sale at your local county fair would be a good place to start.

Along with those farm kids who you know at least by last name, there also are kids who have an obvious interest in livestock and agriculture, just by being at the fair, but who don't have parents frequenting traditional ag businesses. Maybe their grandparents farm or farmed or maybe they've developed the interest in showing all on their own. However they ended up showing, their months of work to train and clean and feed and clean again their animals shows that they may very well be the future of agriculture.

Maybe they'll farm or ranch. Maybe they'll work on a farm or ranch. Or maybe they'll be agronomists or ag bankers or salespeople or veterinarians or mechanics or ag scientists or fill any of the multitude of jobs that everyone worries about going unfilled in the future.

So, by all means, keep bidding on your customers' animals. But, in the interest of growing that next generation, consider bidding on the animal of someone you don't recognize, too. You might be helping out your next employee or someone who, even if they don't end up working in ag, can carry the experience with their livestock with them and be a solid consumer advocate for agriculture.

Next time you're at a fair, go through the barns and get to know the kids. Learn about their ambitions. Watch them work. I think the future of agriculture is in good hands.