The best vintage and horse ploughmen in Otago and Southland will be unearthed in Middlemarch this weekend.
Organiser Sean Leslie, of Middlemarch, said about 30 competitors from Otago and Southland would practise ploughing in Middlemarch on Saturday for a qualifying competition the next day.
Ploughmen would be competing on the Sunday between 10am and 3pm.
The public were welcome either day.
Both days would be held on a grazing block owned by the Jopp family, opposite Cottesbrook Station in Moonlight Rd.
The annual national ploughing competition would be held in Palmerston North in April next year where ploughmen would compete across four championship classes - conventional, reversible, horse and vintage.
The ploughmen representing Otago and Southland in the conventional and reversible classes had been selected but 15 vintage ploughmen and three teams of Clydesdale horses would compete in Middlemarch for two spots in both classes to represent Otago and Southland at the nationals.
The Clydesdale horses were always popular with the crowd, Mr Leslie said.
''That's how New Zealand was broken in - horses pulled everything. It's cool watching horses plough, because there is quite an art to it.''
Taieri Ploughing Association chairman John Thornton will judge the Middlemarch competition.
The Momona dairy farmer has won three national ploughing titles between 1975 and 1985 and represented New Zealand at the world contest which is held annually in any one of the 30 countries affiliated to the World Ploughing Organisation.
During the weekend, he would be looking for ploughmen with ''flair'' who create straight and even furrows - '' a neat and tidy plot with no rough bits, with the grass and the stubble buried''.
A ploughed plot should be easy to walk on and a crop should be able to be drilled straight in, he said.
Mr Thornton expected the earth in Middlemarch to be ''nice and silty'' for the ploughmen to turn a 60m by 20m patch within three hours.
