President Kiera Melen said a number of young people had entered this year’s cooking competition, which was great news for the show society.

“We seem to have a lot of young ones entering cooking this year. We get our regulars every year but we seem to have a few new younger kids coming through, which is what we’re aiming for so we can keep it going,” she said.

“There’s a big cake competition and if they win at our show level it goes up to group level (throughout the region), then it goes up to Melbourne Show.”

Ms Melen also said it was good to see so much effort by schools such as Bullarto Primary and Daylesford Dharma to participate.

“We’re aiming to get the kids involved,” she said.

Ms Melen said she believed the show was still important to the Daylesford community, especially in an era where major city shows had become heavily commercialised and trade-dominant.

“A lot of people talk about it, a lot of people go, but then we get people who don’t know about it,” she said.

“We do get a good crowd there.

”We still have our sheep and our goats and our hoses, chooks and pigeons. We haven’t had cattle for a couple of years.”

Ms Melen also said rabbits wouldn’t feature at this year’s show because of a disease that had wiped out large numbers through breeders.

Another key feature of this year’s Daylesford Show will be the more than 200 classes of horse competitions.

“It’s one of the last shows on the circuit before the big horse shows,” she said.

“Our horse program is huge. We’ve got over 200 classes in our horse program – we’ve got the opens, standard breeds, palominos, harness, showjumping – it’s huge. We have seven rings running.”

The Daylesford Show will be held this Saturday, November 26 at at Victoria Park.

Entry is $10 for adults, $5 for children and pensioners, families for $25 and children under five free.