The A&P

Janice and I had an opportunity on Saturday to attend the Oxford, New Zealand A&P Show. We had been scheduled to go to Ashburton to teach piano lessons, but they cancelled due to a Primary activity. We heard about the A&P(Agriculture and Pastoral) show which is sort of like the county fairs held in the fall in the U.S. (remember it is just turning fall here), and decided to take a short trip into the country to see what it was all about. We were not disappointed! It was great! A show of Kiwi life extraordinaire. There were thousands of people in attendance, and the farmers, ranchers, sheep men and local craft persons were proud to show everything off. We were directed into a very large paddock (fenced off pasture) to park, then ushered into the fair grounds where vendors sold their wares.

 

As you can see it was held in an absolutely beautiful setting.

One of the first things we saw was stunt riders doing motorcycle jumps from a take-off ramp. They looked like they were having loads of fun and the crowd loved it.

 

Since this is an Agricultural fair, the next display was of tractors and farm machinery of all kinds--brand new equipment and antiques. The New Zealanders love to preserve and restore old stuff and they are good at it. We always see old restored cars when we travel. The Kiwis are quite nostalgic.

 

Next we saw this chopping competition which to me looked down right dangerous. These men were showing off their ax skills and trying to keep their toes in the process. I was surprised to note that most of them were older blokes. They did not look like lumberjacks, in fact they looked out of shape, but they barely worked up a sweat.

The next competition we came across was the Work Horses. They were showing their skills by guiding their horses through an obstacle course of sorts while standing upright on a sled.

We are in New Zealand, so obviously they are going to have their number 1 commodity judged--sheep! Here are the sheep pens and some of New Zealand’s finest.

This was the Grand Champion Marino Ram! “Bahh, Ram Ewe!”

Next up were the Sheep Shearing competitions. Most of you won’t remember the movie starring Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr, called the “Sundowners”.  It was a great movie about Depression-era Australia and a man and his family that traveled around the country trying to earn a living as a sheep shearer. It depicted quite clearly that shearing sheep is hard, hard work. We sat behind some of the competitors of the shearing competition and they gave us some insights as to what is involved with shearing, complete with showing us how the clippers worked. They were such nice guys. They told us their name was Morgan, which is a Welch name.

 

The younger guy, Jared, said that he could shear about 150 sheep per day, the older guy said his best was around 395 sheep per day but said some guys could do close to 700 sheep per day! Oh, my aching back!

In this picture, some of the winners are receiving their ribbons and award money. Competitors came from all over New Zealand. Mr. Morgan said that competitions had allowed him to compete all over the world, including the U.S. and Great Britain.

Here are some other competitors and some of the equipment they use. This shearer was competing in the blade competition. They used hand powered clippers, it was the old fashioned way of shearing. Some of these poor sheep got thrown around and nicked up a bit by the clippers, and we felt sorry for them, but we never heard them complain.  Because using blades is so much slower we wondered why they would ever use this method.  The Morgans told us it was used in colder weather because it left the sheep covered with a short layer of wool for warmth.

Here is some of the wool taken from the sheep during the competition.

This picture shows Janice holding some of the power shears that were used by the Morgans.

I had to shoot this guy’s picture.  He is 100% Kiwi.

A fun and colorful part of the festivities. By the way, here they would spell colorful with a “u”, colourful.

I am not sure what this bloke was looking at.

One thing I regret is not trying one of their battered hot dogs on a stick. They are kind of like an American Corn Dog, but the batter is not made out of corn meal, it is just a batter, like donut batter.  I am sure the Hot Dog was not the same either, but it looked good.

We missed the dog trials where these working dogs strut their stuff and herd the sheep into pens (like in the movie “Babe”) but we had a great day at the A&P Show. We wish we could take you all to see it.

One last picture I would like to share is a photo of a sunflower that Abby, one of our YSA, gave us in a pot when it was a seedling. It is now grown and blossoming. Thank you Abby.