Chilliwack farmer plows through competition
In the world of competitive plowing, uniformity is key, and Chilliwack dairy farmer Francis Sache is king.
The 33-year-old father of one was crowned Canada’s top plowman at the 2017 Canadian Plowing Championship earlier this month, earning him a place at the ‘plowing Olympics’ next year in Germany.
It’s an honour few in Canada will understand, bringing to mind blackand-white photographs of hayseed farmers walking behind horsedrawn plows.
But with government-supported teams and crowds in the hundreds of thousands, international plowing competitions are more like NASCAR than The Grapes of Wrath.
Sache, who comes from a family of plowmen (his uncle Jim Sache is an international judge), used a borrowed open-station John Deere tractor and a two-bottom plow at the national match that was held in Walkerton, Ont. during the Labour Day long weekend.
Like car racing, machinery is crucial to the plowman’s success. Many hours are spent tinkering behind the barn to optimize both tractor and plow.
“You can use any tractor you want,” Sache explained, “but you want to have the right tires.”
An open-station tractor, meaning the seat is not enclosed in a cab, provides the best visibility.
The plow has two mouldboards — meaning two large shields overturn the earth as it moves forward — leaving behind a trench and slice of soil that’s called a furrow.
Plowmen fine-tune their plow’s hydraulics to give them better control over its depth and placement in the field. Sache competes in the reversible plow category, meaning the plow flips at the end of each row and the soil overturns to the right going one way, and to the left on the way back.
“I started plowing in Grade 8,” he said. “We have a local plowing match here in Chilliwack. My family was involved in it, so I was too. It’s my hobby now.”
Sache said the competitors have become friends, and the crowds — especially at the European matches — are exciting.
The mechanical aspect is interesting and also practical: The farmer is now harvesting winter feed for his dairy cows from fields he plowed and planted in the spring.
Plowing matches have a long history. As far back as medieval times, fields have been plowed in preparation for seed. The virtuous Plowman is a notable character in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Pioneer farmers used oxen or dray horses to pull their plows.
But the introduction of the tractor in the early 1900s revolutionized farming and crop work with it.