From washing cows to flavoring cream puffs, Wisconsin State Fair is getting ready to open

This year's Wisconsin State Fair starts Thursday , but setup has been going on for weeks, and in some cases, even months.

State Fair director of public relations Kristi Chuckel said that although the bulk of setup happens two to three weeks before the fair, some departments start their preparations much earlier.

"If you see all these beautiful flowers that are a big part of the fair, they get planted in spring, and all summer long there will be vendors sprucing up their stands, painting, putting up their new menus," Chuckel said. "And hundreds of people work for Original Cream Puffs , they're doing their employee training for months beforehand, and then like the chairs on the sky glider, those go up several weeks before the start of the fair."

This year's preparations were a bit different than usual, with setup in some areas needing to pause as National Guard members were housed at the Exposition Center and the Tommy G. Thompson Youth Center during the Republican National Convention in mid-July.

"So we focused on other areas of setup during that week, and at this point, we're pretty much 24 hours a day," Chuckel said. "A lot of that is due to the animals. If you're lucky enough to be here at 3 in the morning, you'll see people getting their animals ready for the shows."

Washing cows, prepping equipment and spray painting manure containers

Colton Grinstead, 18, was leading some of the preparations in one of the cattle barns on Tuesday morning. Grinstead, who works on his family's farm, Vir-Clar Farms , in Fond du Lac, said he and fellow Fond du Lac County farmers had arrived at the fair early that morning with 31 heifers and cows.

"At home, the animals all got haircuts to get ready for the fair, and here everyone is getting a bath," Grinstead said. "During the fair, we make sure they have plenty of hay all day long and we clean out these black buckets that catch manure, and we keep water for them and brush their tails."

Grinstead said he's one of the older members of the team of teenagers from Fond du Lac County farms, who will stay in the dorms at the Tommy G. Thompson Youth Center through Sunday, when their animals are finished with their shows.

Jim Heinen — who was busy setting up the nearby milking parlor — considers himself "semi-retired" now, but for many years, he was a chaperone for Sheboygan County teenage dairy farmers. This year, Heinen arrived at the fair on Sunday before opening and, along with his coworkers, has been cleaning, painting and maintaining milking equipment in preparation for the approximately 100 cows he anticipates will be milked at the fair this year.

Heinen also joked that one of his most important jobs was restocking the stash of Tootsie Rolls for all the kids who will be watching the cows get milked; he went through more than 50 bags last year.

Isaac Zwieg, 17, and Parker Sauer, 16, were hard at work at their seasonal jobs in the fair's agriculture department. They were in good spirits as they spray painted a manure container purple. All of the agriculture departments' equipment — from leaf blowers to garbage cans to manure containers — are painted purple so other departments' workers "don't walk away with our stuff," according to the teenagers.

Getting ready for 2024's 'biggest new thing'

People were also hard at work in the cream puff building, where, according to Chuckel, the fair's "biggest new thing" for 2024 is happening.

This year, in honor of the Original Cream Puff's 100th birthday, four flavors in addition to classic will be available . Each day, from Aug. 1-10, there will only be 1,924 first-come, first-served cream puffs of the special flavor du jour (in honor of the first year State Fair cream puffs were sold).

The special flavor will be root beer float Aug. 1-3, raspberry cheesecake Aug. 4-6, English toffee Aug. 7-9 and chocolate birthday cake on Aug. 10. On Aug. 11, the last day of the fair, it will be back to just the classic cream puff flavor.

"Every year, we have people asking about different flavors, and we've had them available in drive-through events during COVID and in pop-up seasonal events," Chuckel said. "But it's so important for us to keep up the quality of the original flavor, so we hadn't done special flavors during the fair before.

"But, because this is the 100th birthday, they decided they were up to the challenge this year, but even with that, it'll just be that limited number each day to keep up the quality of the original."

In a sense, this year's cream puff experience is emblematic of the fair as a whole — a little something new, with a big dose of familiar.

Chuckel noted that her favorite part of the fair is when her kids join her, and they do all their treasured State Fair traditions — the sky glider, the giant slide, "spending lots of money in the expo hall."

"I think we're like most people," Chuckel said. "We want to know what's new each year and we love that there's something new, but we really come for the traditions."

More: Wisconsin State Fair 2024: Dates, cost, discounts, carry-in policies and other need-to-know info

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: From washing cows to flavoring cream puffs, Wisconsin State Fair is getting ready to open