Continued: High-tech sideshow on the 'Hill'

We like our State Fair sticky, in terms of weather and food. We like it piquant, with a miasma of barnyard and grease-pit scents wafting throughout the grounds. But most of all, we like it retro, a nostalgic throwback to a simpler, gentler time.

Except when it's not.

Slowly but inexorably, the 21st century is invading and pervading the Great Minnesota Get-Together, a first-day visit showed. The 4H Club, Pronto Pups and yardsticks aren't going anywhere, but they are being joined by high-school-built robots, nitrogen-frozen ice cream and a 123-foot wind turbine.

There's even an entirely "green" building -- from the Minnesota AFL-CIO, no less -- with a roof that reflects heat and funnels rainwater to the gardens below, porous concrete and other elements that would look right at home in the nearby Eco Experience.

"We have a lot of construction workers, and the construction of tomorrow is going to have to have environmental considerations," explained AFL-CIO secretary Steve Hunter as he showed off the new $1.2 million building.

"Of course," he added with a laugh, "it doesn't work so well if someone leaves this door open."

There also would have been a robotic cow-milker at the Cattle Barn, a favorite last year, if it hadn't been "sold out from under us at the last minute," said milking-parlor superintendent Doris Mold. "They're selling faster than they can make them."

Not that the last-minute "yanking away" of the modernistic machine has left the fair's milkers high and dry, or even unwired. Mold showed off a computer that IDs each cow from a chip in its collar and keeps track of its breeding and feeding status and milk weight. Some cows can produce up to 140 pounds of milk a day -- all of it extracted, by the way, with machines.

"We don't do this anymore," said Mold, making the up-and-down, teat-squeezing motion.

There's more dairy-related tech at the fair's Blue Sky Creamery stand, where milk is blasted with liquid nitrogen measuring minus-320 degrees (F.) to create Nitro Ice Cream. The process is encapsulated in the servers' T-shirts, which read "0-350 MPH ... 0.007 seconds." The ice cream is thick, smooth and perhaps the fair's only frozen dish concocted by a pair of Ph.Ds.

"The faster you freeze it, the smaller the ice crystals are," co-inventor T.J. Paskach said. "Those ice crystals are water, so with fewer of them, our ice cream is denser."

Not that customers believe that.

"Most people buy cups because they're afraid it will melt in a cone," Paskach said. "But actually it melts super-slowly because it's so dense."

Going for a ride in style

Even the midway rides and farm implements are higher-tech. The new Haunted Mansion Dark Ride has as many bytes as bolts.

"[The computer] tells the operator where everything is and the ride what to do," owner Michael Lauther said. "The operator pushes a green button, and the ride runs itself."

On what used to be called Machinery Hill -- it's no longer so denoted on State Fair maps and "now they just call it 'the Hill,'" one wag noted -- there are computer-operated combines and plow blades that look like something out of "The Terminator." But the most eye-catching bit of machinery might be an amphibious ice-fishing house on wheels.

The Wilcraft Float, invented by Mahtomedi's Tom Roering, is a squat, lightweight four-wheeler with three fishing holes, a foam layer on the rest of the bottom and a Thinsulate-lined cover on top. It can reach 20 miles per hour and is designed to have an extremely light footprint, Roering said.

"It can get out there as soon as ice is walkable, maybe even a little before," Roering said of the vehicle, which is designed for two people and starts at $10,495. "We've had it out on as thin as an inch of fresh, hard ice -- not that we recommend that."

Just in case someone hits the semifrozen lake too early, as ice anglers are wont to do, the Wilcraft does live up to its name: It floats.

Nearby, the newer display items at Northern Tool & Equipment include electric and lithium-powered solar bikes and a seed press-biodiesel machine tandem that creates vegetable oil for organic diesel fuel.

These actually are old-style machines, but they exemplify the State Fair itself: old-fashioned ingenuity to solve contemporary problems. In this case, it's the high cost of fuel.

Over at the Eco Experience, it's the Eating Healthy and Local booth, which has a longer queue than the solar phone recharging station, or the display touting clotheslines for drying shirts and unmentionables, which is drawing as many gawkers as the towering wind turbine out front.

The everlasting lesson: What's old is indeed new again.

Bill Ward • 612-673-7643