A man prepares for Ag-Quip 2011. Photo: Fairfax
JUST like its slightly older big-brother event, the Tamworth Country Music Festival, the Gunnedah agricultural field days that is AgQuip is celebrating its 40th year this week.
It is a remarkable achievement in a world where not all such events have such longevity.
It has survived droughts and depressed primary industry periods.
It has weathered industrial turmoil, trade accounts deficits and market slumps.
It has been a barometer for rural life, for the man on the land and for the agricultural industry generally.
Today it sees a technological and technical milestone that has changed the face of farming.
Our grandfathers would see a very different landscape to the one they endured in the early part of last century, and, in the 40 years that AgQuip has existed, the changes on-farm have been almost as significant.
Like all things, this event is a testament to the imagination, vision and creativity of men who came before.
AgQuip, says its chief executive, Barry Harley, forever changed the way rural and agricultural products and services are sold to people on the land.
One of the founding fathers of both the festival and AgQuip, Max Ellis, one of the visionary marketing men who came out of the marketing team that was the original radio station network king of this region, saw it as as the first truly commercial sales promotion run by marketing people, bringing and selling products and services to country people.
It was truly a pioneer event.
It took the machinery to where it was being used and became a giant shop where producers could talk to directors, designers, suppliers, bankers and agri-politicians.
You get the tyre-kickers, too.
AgQuip has become a meeting place for rural people from across the countryside, as well as an information hub and education lesson for everyone from kids to grannies and celebrity-seekers.
In its first year it attracted 63 exhibitors; today a handful of those remain under their original trading name.
Others exist under other banners that demonstrate the development of the industry from a segmented, fragmented rural thing to the conglomerates, corporations and financial multinationals we see in our backyards now.
It is a world away from the days when AgQuip began when those men with that vision also actually ran around, removing the garbage and filling in potholes for the next day's opening.
It endures.
Their legacy and legend does, too.