CORRIN, Neb. — The Sauer County Fair Board voted 5-2 on Friday to disqualify a butter sculpture depicting last year’s prize-winning butter sculpture, ruling that the entry violated a new fair rule against what the board called “butter recursion.”
The sculpture, 4 feet 2 inches tall and made from 311 pounds of salted butter, was entered in the open division by Marlys Henn, 67, of Corrin, whose butter dairy cow won the fair’s top prize in 2025. This year’s entry depicts that cow, along with a crowd of 14 butter fairgoers admiring it, a butter ribbon, and, in the corner, a small butter likeness of Henn sculpting it.
“Butter has to be about something. It can’t just be about butter,” said Duane Rasmussen, the board’s vice chair, who moved to disqualify the entry at 9:40 a.m. Henn said the sculpture was about the cow, and that the cow was about Nebraska. The board voted against her after a 22-minute discussion of whether Nebraska, in this case, was also butter.
The rule had been adopted earlier the same morning, 5-2, in response to a second entry, filed Thursday by Henn’s neighbor, LaVonne Tiegs, 71, which depicted Henn’s sculpture. A third entry, filed at 6 a.m. Friday by a 4-H club, depicted Tiegs’s sculpture of Henn’s sculpture. By the time the board convened, the fair’s 38-degree display cooler held seven entries, each a slightly smaller sculpture of the one beside it, the last of which is 0.3 inches tall and, according to fair staff, also contains a tiny Henn, sculpting. Fair officials said Friday that an eighth sculpture is believed to exist inside the seventh but have been unable to confirm it without a microscope, which the extension office has been asked to bring. The seventh sculpture was entered in the junior division, as it is the youngest.
Dr. Marjorie Teller, director of the Center for Measured Outcomes, said the Center had measured each sculpture and found that every one was 61.4 percent the height of the one it depicted, “plus or minus a pat.” At that rate, Teller said, the sequence would produce a sculpture smaller than a grain of salt by its 23rd entry, and would by its 40th be too small to contain butter, “at which point it becomes a philosophical sculpture made of the idea of butter.” She said further study was needed and that the Center had applied for funding to continue it at next year’s fair.
Henn has appealed the ruling to the full fair board, which will hear the matter Tuesday in the cattle barn, the only building on the grounds with enough seating. She said she accepted the board’s authority but noted that its rule against recursion had been printed on a sign made of butter.
At press time, fair staff confirmed that a 4-H member had begun work on a sculpture depicting the board meeting at which the sculptures were disqualified. It is 6 feet tall and includes, at the far end of the butter table, a butter Rasmussen holding a butter rulebook, open to the page about butter.