BILLINGS, Mont. – Things are looking up for folks who attend the MATE Show this year.

The St. Vincent HELP Flight will make daily landings at this year’s MATE Show, which runs Feb. 18-20 from 10 a.m.to 6 p.m. Thursday and Friday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. The HELP Flight helicopter plans to make its landing around 1 p.m. each day. Weather, emergency calls and other factors affect the exact timing of the landing.

Ask a Montanan if they’ve ever been frozen and you’re likely to get an affirmative response. But typical winter temps in the Treasure State don’t come close to the extreme frigid more and more people are paying to experience in the name of alleviating their aches and pains.

Cryotherapy might sound like something straight out of a science fiction movie, but the truth is, the practice of using extreme cold temperatures for therapeutic benefit dates back to the 17th century. In 1978, Japan’s Dr. Yamaguchi began employing “freezing” technology to relieve chronic pain in his patients, and Europe has been studying the health benefits of Cryotherapy for the past 30 years.

Yellowstone County Implement, Billings’ local John Deere dealer is a longstanding fixture of the MATE Show. Attendees look forward to their diverse sampling of the latest equipment for farm and home each year, and secretly hope they will be the lucky winner of the MATE Show Grand Prize that Yellowstone County Implement takes part in donating annually (this year, a John Deere Gator).

Yellowstone County Implement is one store of four dealerships in Montana owned by C & B Operations. The partnership of Dan Cronin and Rod Burwell began in 1988 with a single store located in Gettysburg, S.D. It has since expanded to into 24 stores located throughout Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, North Dakota, and Minnesota.

Linn Post and Pipe Supply Company began in 1973 in Linn, Kan., when Emil Peters developed a continuous connection for fence that he thought was better than anything else available at the time.

He did not stop with his patented continuous fencing, but began building other livestock handling equipment with those same principles and values in mind. In 1979 things were going so well he wanted to open a second facility. The Linn Post and Pipe-Creighton Division, as it was then known, was established in Creighton, Neb.

In today’s world, products aren’t expected to last.

Smartphones, the equivalent of a personal computer that fits in your pocket, are replaced every two years. If something breaks, most people buy a replacement rather than repair it the way their grandparents would have done.

Billings, Mont. – To celebrate 40 years of the Montana Agri-Trade Exposition (MATE) organizers are offering big grand prizes for the weekend of Feb. 18 to 20.

Three grand prizes will be up for grabs at the two sections of the MATE show, Agriculture and Home & Health.

They say one’s trash is another’s treasure. Perhaps nowhere is that more true than when describing a man who turns discarded iron into beautiful works of art.

Having learned from his father, Frank Schwegel started creating art from horseshoes as a means to reflect his own personal style.