By DOUG GRAVES
Ohio Correspondent

HUBER HEIGHTS, Ohio – You have to look to major cities in Ohio to see sporting events at the state level. But when it comes to the Ohio State Plowing Contest, the quaint, rural setting at Carriage Hill Farm north of Dayton is that host.

Last month farmers gathered at Carriage Hill Farm north of Dayton for the eighth annual Ohio Horse Plowing contest. Participants advance to the nationals, which will be held at Carriage Hill in August.

“It’s just so relaxing,” contestant Galen Neal of Hillsboro said. “It’s so fun to watch the guys work with their teams and plow. Sometimes, everyone is so caught up watching that all you can hear is chains jingling.”

While this contest has a national stage, the number of entrants at the state level each year is slight. Just 13 competed last month in five classes: antique plow, walking plow, two-horse sulky plow, three-horse sulky plow and gang plow (four or more horses). Competitors were judged on 10 criteria, including levelness, bottom slurry, straightness of the edge and the edges of the rows.
Participants used Percheron and Belgian draft horses as well as mules during the competition. Competitors came from small towns in Ohio such as Seaman, Georgetown and New Vienna.

The first-ever Ohio Horse Plowing contest was started by the Ohio Horse and Mule Group in 2003, an organization founded by Highland County cousins Gary Hopkins and Dean Hopkins. The state plowing contest was first held as part of the Farm Science Review in London, Ohio, in 2003 but for the past three years the event has been at Carriage Hill Farm.

“We approached a lot of draft horse associations in the state to (get) competition at the state level going,” said Gary, who was raised on a small dairy farm. “We had a Fun Day going at Carriage Hill Farm north of Dayton and the people there asked if we’d help them start a national event. We agreed and started contacting people in other states. Word-of-mouth got this event off the ground.”

The World Plowing Contest was first held in Hillsboro in 1957. Tractors, not horses, were used. Gary Hopkins was in high school in 1957 when he had the opportunity to help out with the World Plowing Championships in Peebles. His cousin, Dean, was much younger at the time but he was present that year, too. Both are credited with getting the Ohio plowing contest up and running.
Plowing contests have gotten into the veins of Gary, who had judged numerous horse plowing contests by the time he and Dean decided to start a state championship. “My cousin and I came up with the idea of using plows, not tractors,” Gary said.

To this day competitors come from Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Michigan, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Illinois.
“We’re surprised by the number of competitors from out of state,” Gary said. “There’s a lot of cost involved to travel and there’s no cash for winning. People do it just for the fun of it.”

At the state championship in Hillsboro last month, each contestant had their own 50-by-100-foot plot to plow, which got under way sharply at 9 a.m.
By 3 p.m. the competition was complete. All action took place under cool, wet conditions.

Carriage Hill Farm is one of 25 parks in the Five Rivers Metroparks system in Montgomery County. It covers nearly 1,000 acres and more than 100 acres are farmed with horses, based on the farming practices from the 1800s. Volunteers stage life on this farm as it was in the mid-1800s.

For information about the National Plowing Contest Labor Day weekend, contact Gary Hopkins at 937-725-9894 or Galen Neal at 937-763-0636.