The Salinas Valley Fair isn’t just a fair, but an incredible fundraising effort and a family affair.

Sara Rubin here, contemplating how much I’d pay for a pie. Actually, this was something I had contemplated about a month ago, on April 15, when I attended the Salinas Valley Fair Kickoff Dinner and Dance in King City, where hundreds of attendees filled the 12,000-square-foot Orradre Building for a barbeque dinner and bid on hundreds of items in a silent auction. (The items in the silent auction include cases of local wine and crates of locally grown artichokes, as well as furniture, artwork and agricultural products, like a carton of romaine seed or a five-gallon jug of the herbicide glyphosate.) 

But the main event is the live auction, where some friends and I were eying the possibility of bidding on a homemade dessert. We knew it was a benefit so we expected bidding would be high, but I did not expect $3,500 for a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies with milk, or $5,000 for a homemade nectarine pie or blackberry cobbler. 

But to regulars involved in the nonprofit Salinas Valley Fair and its sister nonprofit, the Salinas Valley Fair Heritage Foundation, these kinds of auction prices are…normal. This community shows up ready to empty their pockets to invest in the fair.

"Everything we do at the Salinas Valley Fair is funded by our local community," says Mikel Ann Miller, who serves on the board of the Heritage Foundation, which formed in 2001 to support the fair, fairgrounds infrastructure and ancillary activities like Future Farmers of America and 4H. "It's just a very giving, loving, supportive community."

Unlike the Monterey County Fair on the state-owned fairgrounds in Monterey, the Salinas Valley Fair is a nonprofit that leases its King City fairgrounds from the county. Instead of governor-appointed board members in California’s 7th Agricultural District operating under the auspices of the state Department of Food and Agriculture’s Fairs & Expositions branch, the Salinas Valley Fair is entirely independent—something that Miller says allows for more local control. (As far as fundraising goes, the local control formula works: In 2020, according to forms the organizations file with the IRS in lieu of tax forms, the Salinas Valley Fair brought in $1.35 million in revenue; the Heritage Foundation raised an additional $246,000.)

These big dollars pay off this week, when the Salinas Valley Fair runs Thursday-Sunday, May 18-21. But these nonprofits are invested in more than the four-day fair—they are ultimately about giving kids an opportunity to shine. For the young people showing livestock, it’s a culmination of a lot of learning as well as a jumping-off point: "This is the foundation of their life ahead,” Miller says. “Most everyone who goes through 4-H and FFA turn out to be your future leaders in agriculture." 

Every year, the Heritage Foundation supports a heritage animal by paying for its feed and upkeep costs, and supporting a student who raises the animal with a scholarship. This year’s heritage animal is a Hampshire pig, raised by Anahi Lopez of the Salinas High School FFA.

Lopez’s prize pig will be auctioned off during the junior livestock auction (8am-3pm Saturday) at the fair. (Before that, the Heritage Foundation invites people to buy shares of the heritage animal for $2,000 each, with up to 100 buyers in any given year—that money is a donation to the foundation. This year, donations are in memory of Nate Holaday, who died in February; Holaday served on the Salinas Valley Fair board for years, including as director of the junior livestock auction.)

Miller, now 67, has a multi-generational, lifelong Salinas Valley Fair story herself, one that she says is fairly typical. She first showed livestock there at age 9 (a lamb, then later cows and pigs). Her dad showed at the fair, and both of her children; she met her husband, Lynn Miller, at the fair.

"The fair is such a big event because it's a homecoming,” she says. 

See you at the fair. And no, I didn’t win a pie at the auction—out of my league—so let me know if you want to share a dessert.

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