Ploughing Champs success
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.
"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.
