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Angela Taylor is one of two women competing at this year's New Zealand Ploughing Championships.
Angela Taylor is one of two women who have qualified for this year's New Zealand Ploughing Championships to be held at Rongotea on April 16 and 17.
"There are only two women competing at this level, myself in the North Island and Tryphena Carter in the South Island," Taylor told Rural News.
Other women also compete in the vintage ploughing division and in horse ploughing.
Taylor says her husband Malcolm started competing with a conventional plough in 2004 and changed to reversible ploughing in 2005 and she had travelled and supported him until 2007 when she decided to compete herself.
"I was a dairy farmer and had been around and using machinery most of my life – so why not?" she says. "And learning to plough was fairly straightforward."
Taylor has a modified Kverneland conventional two furrow plough with plastic mould boards and uses a McCormack C85 Max tractor.
By her own reckoning, she believes she has competed in over 80 matches with numerous wins and placings.
She does all the truck and trailer driving in taking her tractor and plough and other competitors' tractors and ploughs to various matches nationwide.
Ploughing champions Mark Dillon and Malcolm Taylor earned the right to represent the country at the World Ploughing Championships in Osijek, Croatia, on 5 and 6 September, after winning their titles at the New Zealand Ploughing Championships in Middlemarch in 2025.
Sean Leslie and Casey Tilson from Middlemarch, with horses Beau and Dough, took out the Rural News Horse Plough award at the Power Farming NZ Ploughing Championships at Horotiu, near Hamilton, on April 13-14.
The mood is relaxed as father and son ploughmen Paul and Derek Houghton get some practice in, but when the national championship starts this Saturday it will be a different story.
With our own National Fieldays only few weeks away, Rural News took the opportunity to take a trip overseas – as a guest of Enterprise Ireland, which invited 190 guests from 19 countries – to look at Ireland’s own national event, locally known as The Ploughing.
There are high hopes that the 66th New Zealand Ploughing Championships will go ahead on schedule this year, after the disruptions to last year's event caused by the Covid lockdown.
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