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Giant "Mini Farm" Display Keeps Growing
What do you do when you're in your 20's and still like to play with farm toys? Dusty Ranallo and Cody Molls found the perfect cover - set up a mini farmstead display for a community event. For the past decade, the Wisconsin cousins have set up a display each year during the Moon Lake Threshermen's Association Threshing
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Giant "Mini Farm" Display Keeps Growing FARM HOME recreation 33-6-44 What do you do when you're in your 20's and still like to play with farm toys? Dusty Ranallo and Cody Molls found the perfect cover - set up a mini farmstead display for a community event. For the past decade, the Wisconsin cousins have set up a display each year during the Moon Lake Threshermen's Association Threshing Bee in Turtle Lake, Wis., the third weekend in August.
The display keeps growing. The 16 by 24-ft. display in 2009 contained eight farms, a farm dealership and a town û all in 1/64-scale.
They blame Grandpa for their time-consuming hobby.
"Our grandpa started giving us tractors as Christmas presents," Molls says. "Pretty soon, at age 10 or so, we had so much stuff we started setting up at the show."
The farm display evolved from a 4 by 8-ft. sheet of plywood to 3-ft. tall stud walls that support several sheets of plywood topped with 2-in. foam, indoor/outdoor carpet, and real dirt, hay, corn and grains. Roads are made of fine kitty litter. Rivers are cut into the farm.
It takes about four hours to set up the base, before the cousins can "play."
"There's no rhyme or reason to how we set up," Molls says. "He starts in one corner, and I start on the other, and we meet in the middle."
"We try to include pretty much everything - cash crop farming, dairy and beef farms," Ranallo says. "We try to make it realistic for this area."
It takes 40 to 50 hours to finish the scene. Then for two days the cousins watch everyone from toddlers to senior citizens inspect their work. Some comment on the details they include. Others ask how long it took them to create.
With a shop vacuum to suck up and save some of the material, and totes for the farm toys and buildings, it only takes about three hours to put the farms away for another year.
The cousins are also considering building a display on a trailer that they could take to other events, including the National Farm Toy Show in Dyersville, Iowa.
"People say we'll probably never grow out of it," Ranallo says.
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Cody Molls, 1421 3 1/2 St., Turtle Lake, Wis. 54889 (ph 715 308-1695; mollsc@uwstout.edu) or Dusty Ranallo, 222 Osterman Dr., Turtle Lake, Wis. 54889 (ph 715 541-3161; ranallo_dustin@yahoo.com).
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