COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – Between the food, sustainable cleanup, and animal health, there are many people working behind the scenes at the Ohio State Fair to make sure everything goes smoothly.

Over the roughly two weeks of the fair, more than 20,000 livestock animals are brought to the fairgrounds by exhibitors, according to the Ohio State Fair. Exhibitors are making sure they are healthy with the help of veterinary medical officers from the Ohio Department of Agriculture (ODA).

“We are fairly involved in not only our state fair but also our county fairs,” ODA field veterinarian Dr. Angela Rospert said.

There are field veterinarians like Rospert at the fair at all times. In addition to drug testing for competition animals, the doctors also walk through the barns making sure all the animals are healthy.

“Just to visually inspect all of the animals here,” Rospert said. “We’re mostly looking for clinical signs of different diseases that may be of concern whether they would be ones that would be contagious to the other animals here or whether they could be contagious to the people and animals.”

There’s also work you might see that’s gone on by the Taste of Ohio Cafe. Zero Waste Event Productions was set up at the cafe for six days, working to keep as much waste as possible out of the landfill. That work includes sorting through food scraps, empty cans, utensils, and more.

“A lot of people think it’s dirty work; we love it, though. It’s fantastic,” Zero Waste Chief Sustainability Officer Shannon Pratt-Harrington said.

Throughout the organization’s six days at the fair, more than 1,700 pounds of compost was diverted from the landfill and more than 500 pounds of recycling was collected.

“It’s really important and I think it’s interesting to be doing this at the Ohio State Fair, where so much is related to agriculture and farming, to be taking something that is essentially a resource, which is compostable service ware and food scraps, sending it to a facility, and it’s going to be turned into something new like a soil product, which is very agriculture,” Pratt-Harrington said.