Balmoral 2024: Twelve months in the making

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Transcript

00:00 This is Rhonda Geary, Group Operations Director at the Royal Ulster Agricultural Society.

00:07 Rhonda, this is day three of the Balmoral Show. As ever, it is a fabulous show. It is running so smoothly.

00:14 The crowds are huge, but people don't realise perhaps how much work has to go into this all year to make it all happen so smoothly.

00:21 Can you give us a flavour of how much work goes in year round?

00:24 After the show finishes on Saturday, we will start to pull the show down next week and break down.

00:32 Then we are straight into committee meetings with all the various different sections.

00:36 That is everything from horse committee, rabbit committee, catering committee.

00:40 Meet with them all and see how things went in their various areas.

00:43 Compile a list of things we might want to change or do for the following year.

00:46 The first thing we do is start to invite the judges for next year.

00:50 We need to give them a good 12 month notice because there is competition out there from other large shows for judges.

00:57 We bring most of our judges from the mainland for the equine, cattle and sheep.

01:02 It is really a 12 hour operation.

01:05 We then start to put the trade stands up for sale about September time.

01:09 We need the summer to plan that and to plan our maps of where things are going to go.

01:14 It is a year round hard slog to put on such a fabulous and huge event.

01:20 Over 55 acres and 500 trade stands?

01:23 Almost 600 trade stands this year.

01:26 We have approximately 4000 animals on site over the four days.

01:30 It is a mammoth task to put that all together.

01:33 It is not just the Balmoral show that we organise.

01:35 We have our beef and lamb event in November and our winter fair in December.

01:39 We have other areas of the industry that we organise events for.

01:44 Do it so successfully as well Rhonda?

01:46 Yes, they all run very well for us.

01:48 We have a great team of staff and great supporters in our voluntary stewards and our committee members.

01:54 How many people are involved?

01:56 There would be 250 voluntary stewards and quite a lot of them make up the committees that we have as well.

02:02 Then we have a small team of about 15 staff.

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