South East's 2025 agricultural show season starts this weekend

They showcase our rural producers, display a range of entertainment and provide fun for all the family.

That’s right, we are talking about agricultural shows, and the NSW South East’s season kicks off this weekend.

From Candelo to Cooma, Bemboka to Braidwood and beyond, the region’s towns will come alive when their show is held over the next several months.

However, the Bega Show is taking a break this year, but we will get to that below.

The region’s season starts with the Candelo Show, which has run since 1883.

This year’s show is on this Sunday (19 January) and will feature gardening advice, kids’ activities, music, wood-chopping and stock events, while the pavilion will contain produce, photos, LEGO creations and more.

The show’s publicity officer, Louise Fish, said there will also be an animal nursery, which will have a cockatoo they are hoping will not start swearing!

She said highlights included the dog high jump – remarking, “Everyone loves the dog high jump” – as well as the young farmers’ challenge. This is a competition in which teams will complete timed farm-based activities.

Ms Fish also said the home-brew and fruitcake entries were “highly contested”.

The next show on the region’s calendar is the 147th Eurobodalla Show, to be held 25 and 26 January.

Last year, almost 6000 attendees and competitors attended the show over its whole weekend. However, Eurobodalla District Show Society treasurer Lindsay Boyton said numbers at their events during the year had been down due to travelling costs.

“But the locals here, they will still come out and come to the show,” he said.

“The community does come out in force.”

The 2025 show will feature the return of cattle, dog high jump and dog ball catching, a stockman who will show off his skills with animals, a kids zone and more.

More unusually, it will also feature what has been called a ‘chicken poo lottery’. A chicken will walk around a numbered board and when it stops to do a poo, the person who bought that section of the board will win a prize.

“It’s the first for our show; I don’t know if anyone else has done it!” Mr Boyton said.

When asked how his region’s farmers and producers had coped over 2024, Mr Boyton said, “With this rain now, they are laughing”.

“But before this lot of rain over the last week, they were very short of water,” he said.

“People were buying water in.”

Meanwhile, the Bega Show will not be held this year due to the construction of the new Bega Valley Evacuation Centre, which is taking place at the town’s showground and is not expected to be completed until later this year.

Ian Bryson, the Bega Show Society’s president, said their next show would be their 150th.

“So we would like to make it a memorable one,” he said.

He said they would “definitely” hold the show in 2026 and in the meantime were also performing work to improve the showgrounds.

The South East simply has too many shows to cover in just one article.

To see the dates of all the state’s shows, as well as to find more information about them, head to the Ag Shows NSW website.