To Kentucky high schoolers, the University of Kentucky’s Field Day is “almost like the Olympics.”  

That’s how Charles Byers, one of the founders of Field Day in the spring of 1970, describes the annual event.  

On April 24, the UK Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment will welcome more than 2,000 students to Kroger Field for Field Day, which includes agriculture competitions and networking opportunities with fellow high school students and the Martin-Gatton CAFE community. 

As an agriculture teacher in Graves County in the early 1960s, Byers took his high school students to a field day at Murray State University. In 1965, Byers returned to UK; he would go on to get his doctorate degree and be an agricultural education professor until his retirement in 2003.  

Within a few years, Byers recommended that UK host a field day.

“I was confident it would be a good thing for the university to do,” Byers wrote in his in-progress manuscript. “I knew this type of event could give the students the opportunity to meet other students from across the state and region, along with giving some of them their first opportunity to visit Lexington and be exposed to the University of Kentucky beyond just listening to Kentucky basketball games on radio.”  

Byers wrote a letter to Charles Barnhart, then dean of the College of Agriculture, who approved the idea and named Byers and Curte Ferguson of the associate dean’s office as co-chairs of the first UK Field Day.  

As they planned, the co-chairs recruited other faculty members to get involved. Now called the Department of Animal & Food Sciences, the Livestock Department gathered cows, steers and hogs for Field Day. 

“A field day needed a field,” Byers wrote, and the first Field Day was held by E.S. Good Barn. Kroger Field, where Field Day is hosted today, wouldn't open as Commonwealth Stadium for about eight more years.  

“Although we had a small shoestring budget, approximately 800 students from throughout Kentucky piled into school buses and headed over to Lexington early in the morning for our very first field day,” Byers wrote. “The early success of the field day created enough enthusiasm and support for us to continue holding the event.”  

And the event has continued to grow. Over the past 55 years, Field Day has added more attendees, more support and more competitions—such as public demonstrations that allow students to practice public speaking and more categories from auctioneering to floriculture to welding. 

Showing students what’s possible at UK   

Brenda Oldfield was Byers’ graduate assistant when she first became involved with Field Day in 1976—primarily working with the agriculture education society to cook for the attendees.  

Originally from Morgan County, Oldfield started at UK as a home economics student because her older brother, a UK animal sciences graduate, told her that “girls don’t need to go into agriculture.” 

But Oldfield happened to attend a picnic hosted by the agriculture college, met several professors, including Byers, and changed her major to agricultural education. She would go on to become the first woman to teach agriculture in Arizona and one of the first in Kentucky.  

Oldfield taught in Morgan County for six years and Scott County for 19 years—and brought her high school students to UK’s Field Day every single year.  

As a teacher, Oldfield loved how the Field Day contests interested and motivated her students to learn in the classroom, and getting to visit UK’s campus and meet the professors was “very impressive” for her students.  

“My big focus was to expose them to UK, expose them to all the different activities, and as a result I always had several students go to the University of Kentucky and major in agriculture,” she said.  

Each year, Field Day helps UK Martin-Gatton CAFE fulfill a vital part of its mission: advancing agriculture and educating the next generation of professionals in the agriculture industry.  

“How can one not enjoy spending a day with the next generation of agricultural leaders?” said Stacy Vincent, professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Community and Leadership Development. “To see agriculture teachers and 4-H agents from all over the Commonwealth come to the university is humbling and inspiring.” 

To learn more about Field Day 2025, visit https://cld.ca.uky.edu/ukfieldday.  

# # # 

Writer: Bailey Vandiver, bailey.vandiver@uky.edu   

The Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment is an Equal Opportunity Organization with respect to education and employment and authorization to provide research, education information and other services to individuals and institutions that provide equal opportunities for qualified persons in all aspects of institutional operations and do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, ethnic origin, religion, creed, age, physical or mental disability, veteran status, uniformed service, political belief, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, marital status, genetic information or social or economic status.