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Too scared to plough?

My only real attempt has been in a charity ploughing match, using a 1939 John Deere and a trailed plough, which was owned by Derek Blynn. I was clueless, and it was all very public, and somewhat embarrassing...

A couple of days before that match my brother Pete tried to show me how to ‘do an opening’ by drawing a diagram on the back of an envelope. It looked so complicated that I ended up nodding and saying “oh yeah, yeah” like it was all making sense, just because I wanted the explanation to end, as it was only serving to confuse me even further. When it came to the day I had a 15 minute ‘go’ on the tractor before starting to plough, just to fathom out the hand clutch and all the peculiarities that went with this old rarity of a tractor.

Then it was time to start ploughing. If it hadn’t been so cold I would certainly have been sweating. I had to just hope that since my father and grandfather before me had been ploughmen, some sort of ploughing ‘instinct’ might miraculously kick in. It didn’t, but what happened instead was that I was given so much advice on what lever to turn which way, and what to place where, that I felt that the subsequent work wasn’t really my own. It was undoubtedly better than my own would have been, but I think you need to mess up a bit in order to learn.

I have since seen the same thing happen at ploughing matches where an expert (usually a dad or grandad) is helping a youngster with his first attempt at competitive ploughing. The expert is doing all of the work and making all of the decisions, and after a while the youngster gets this faraway look in his eye, and isn’t really learning anything at that point. Of course the problem is that most people don’t have a place where they can practise their ploughing, so they are learning at the match, which is far from ideal. They say that the show ring isn’t the place to train your horse, well it follows that neither is the ploughing match the best place in which to learn to plough.

Since that little John Deere was such an eye catching little number, I had a hoard of spectators around me, which was the last thing I needed. I never perform well with an audience (I can reverse a trailer quite well as long as there are no experts watching, honestly!) Anyway, I managed to create a plot full of brown lines at that ploughing match, some of which were reasonably straight, but all the same, I didn’t feel that I’d really even begun to get the hang of the plough.

I vowed then that I would try ploughing again one day, on my own tractor, and without the audience, and perhaps with just one kind and tactful person to advise me. But it still hasn’t happened. I only have two very small fields that are ploughable, the rest of the land here consists of peat bog, and if I plough up one of those two little fields it means running short on grazing for months. So part of the reason I’ve never mastered the art of ploughing is because I’ve got nowhere to practise, well that’s my excuse anyway. 

If I’m honest, what really puts me off ploughing is the ‘opening’, as everything rests on that. Back in the days when I was ignorant enough to think that ploughing was just a case of turning the soil over, I’d probably have had a go, and who knows I might have got the hang of it eventually. Now that I’m aware that there’s a lot more to it than first meets the eye, I see it as something complicated that should only be attempted by those who KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THEY’RE DOING. But perhaps I’m taking it all far too seriously?