Key Role Of Plough Supreme Ploughing Award

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31365, 10 May 1967, Page 26

Key Role Of Plough

Supreme Ploughing Award

In Thailand they say “progress follows the plough.” In Canada they say “ploughmen make good citizens.” Both statements are true with the proviso that, in each respective case, progress and citizenship depend upon the quality of the ploughing and of the person.

The key to a tidy, wellfarmed, weed-free, lush crop-producing countryside is good ploughmanship. It was with the plough that the early settlers established progress in New Zealand. The quality of the ploughing has promoted the productivity and orderly appearance of New Zealand farmlands, It was the plough that unlocked the

fertility of the New Zealand soil. This function of the plough is one which no other implement has ever been devised to perform adequately. In this day of exploration by space rocket it is no more an irrelevant recommendation that inter-planet-ary explorers should carry a plough amongst their equipment than it was a couple of hundred years ago to the pioneers who crossed the Pacific Ocean in wooden ships. Supposing you and I and a few others were stranded on an isolated island—an island of virgin soil—without hope of ever returning to our homelands with their cultivated fields. First we would live off the natural foods that might be there for the picking, or to be

hunted or fished for. But, sooner or later, one of us would fashion a tool, a spade, however crude, with which to till the soil so as to be able to plant seeds. And as time passed and our cultivated land area grew,

we would develop another implement which would be a plough. All down the ages and all around the world, the plough has held its place as the first tool of farming. Today’s plough is basically the same tool as man first used to turn up the soil, except for the primitive pointed stick and the garden spade.

The modern plough is a refined tool compared with the crude adaptation of the forked branch of a tree and the later wooden mouldboard, but the principle of ploughing and the function of the plough are still the same.

Technique and efficiency have improved. We appreciate that good ploughing requires skill, for it is a craft and its execution is an art. Bad ploughing can be camouflaged by modern tools used in subsequent tillage operations, but the effects of faulty work persist through many seasons.

Men and women have always taken / delight in matching their skills one against another, always striving to set the highest possible standard of achievement. So it is with ploughing. Farmfolk the world over take pride in a good job well done. They like to see clean-cut furrows and neatly turned earth with all the grass or stubble and weeds buried deeply out of sight, and the field ploughed evenly and in uniformity, with no deep ridges and no high mounds over which to later bump with expensive farm machinery.

Used skilfully the plough is a time and money saver. Care taken in doing a good job of ploughing will ensure the crop being comparatively free from the competition of weeds and will require the minimum of necessary follow-up cultivations with other tools to work the soil into a satisfactory seedbed. It is a job which calls for the ploughman’s concentration, understanding and application. He must choose the right type of plough for the type of land and the job he is doing. He must study the climate. He must apply himself to the mechanics of his implement so that he knows to a nicety just how to adjust his plough to achieve the desired result.

Standards are set by comparisons and the standards of ploughmanship are set at ploughing matches where the best exponents of this fundamental craft meet in friendly competition. Ploughmen learn firsthand in practice and also by observing the techniques of their fellows. In association with the ploughman, the plough manufacturer and the scientist learn how to design and make the right kind of plough. Ploughmen throughout the world are always anxious to extend their hospitality to their fellows. Ideas and experiences are exchanged, problems discussed and studied concerning the soils, climate and the cultivation needs of the various crops they grow. They are a warmhearted, friendly lot to whom the world is a huge field and the land an honest thing which, in return, yields rewardingly to honest treatment with the übiquitous plough.

The Golden Plough, the trophy for the ploughing championship of the world, is an exact replica of an exact replica of an 18th century Norfolk plough in the Science Museum in London. This type of plough can be regarded as the forerunner of modern ploughs.

The Norfolk plough was the type of implement commonly used in the eastern counties of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has several features which date from the previous century when the influences of the improved Dutch ploughs were spreading across the North Sea. At that time there was considerable interchange of trad? and ideas between the Dutch and the English. The introduction of the light Dutch ploughs at the beginning of the seventeenth century enabled an acre a day to be ploughed by one man and two horses. Earlier English ploughs were clumsy tools pulled by 10 or 12 oxen. Three men were needed—one to lead, one to goad the beasts and one to struggle with the plough handles. The distance from the leading ox to the share of the plough was at least 45 feet, and, with

such a beam, would have required an enormous headland, so the field boundaries were shaped in the form of an S, which enabled the furrows to be taken right up to the hedges.

The Dutch ploughs, therefore, represented an enormous improvement and from them developed the type of plough represented on the world ploughing trophy. In 1771 a Norfolk farmer

took his ploughmen and a Norfolk wheel plough south into Hampshire, and its influence may be seen in the design of the famous Hampshire patent iron plough made in 1807. In this and other ways the influence of the Norfolk wheel plough spread widely throughout many parts of Britain.

The Golden Plough was completed in September, 1953, by Garrard and Com-

pany (formerly the Goldsmiths’ and Silversmiths’ Company) in London, the firm which cared for the Crown Jewels and which rebuilt the regalia used by the Queen at her coronation. The inscription on the plough reads: “Pax Arva Colat”—“Let peace cultivate the fields,” a quotation from the works of the Roman poet, Tibullus. The model itself is about 24 inches long overall.

The accompanying article has been specially written by Mr A (Alfred) Hall, general secretary of the World Ploughing Organisation.