Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Ploughing match truly a privilege to witness
Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger spends a day at an event celebrating one of the great agricultural skills and loves every minute, he tells Defra Secretary George Eustice
DEAR George, I went to a ploughing match at the weekend. Now, a lot of people reading that will probably be asking themselves why. Was there, they might be puzzling, something slightly more exciting I could have chosen to do to while away my leisure hours?
Was there not a freshly painted door I could sit and admire for a couple of hours while the gloss dried? Did I not have a garden shed full of tools that needed cleaning, fettling up and arranging on a set of wall hooks in descending order of size?
The fact is, however, that such doubts over my choice of weekend activity could only be raised by someone who has never been to a ploughing match.
Because such events rightly celebrate one of the very fundamentals of farming expertise. They are, in short, what farming is all about.
The uninitiated will gaze at a field being ploughed as they drive past and conclude there is nothing to it. Anyone with a reasonable command of driving skills could do it. Just hook up the plough and off you go.
It’s only when they watch someone like Jeremy Clarkson making such a pig’s ear of it in his TV series that they realise that actually it is a highly skilled operation. And, moreover, one upon whose results the success and profitability of the very farm could depend, because a poorly ploughed field will result in lower yields and therefore lower income.
And I still find it difficult to imagine how that precision was achieved in the past when there was nothing but a horse or two upfront and it demanded huge amounts of effort and sheer muscle power to keep the plough proceeding in a straight line.
This was indeed brought home quite starkly at the match where not only were we treated to the sights of the latest word in sophisticated, computer-assisted tractors in action but were able to go right back through the history of the ploughing art. This was when the tools at the farmer’s disposal were far cruder – as possibly would have been his language if the horse was getting a bit uppity.
I’m afraid far too many people in this country never give farming a second thought from one end of the year to the next and seem to believe that food arrives on their plate thanks to some magical process which demands no human innervation other than to stack it on the shelves.
They would find it hard to comprehend the level of dedication and determination required to produce its basic components and only if they were to attend a ploughing match would they ever get to understand the necessity of maintaining and perfecting those skills.
Skills which farmers have acquired and honed since they first concluded some 10,000 years ago that there was a better way to keep the family fed than wearing themselves out running
after wild animals. There could, for me, have been no better way to spend the day than as a guest of the Bridgwater Agricultural Society. To attend an event which – in contrast to our big agricultural ‘shows’ which in many cases now have all the appeal of a car boot sale on a wet afternoon in January – was a genuine farmers’ gathering and one, moreover, where everyone was having a good time.
Myself included.