There may not be a more beautifully named farm anywhere in the kingdom than this: Parc Grace Dieu, it’s called. And this is appropriate because, even though it is an autumn Sunday in Wales, it is – by the grace of God – an absolutely gorgeous day.

The occasion is the Llangattock-vibon-Abel & District Ploughing and Agricultural Society’s annual Ploughing Match and Show. If the title is uncatchy, this is appropriate, too. In Britain, urban dwellers who barely own a rubber plant or window box fancy themselves as experts on the countryside, and still sense some mystical attachment to the rhythm of nature and their ancestors through the occasional drive to a rustic gastropub.

But – except for the farming press, which is written in Martian – there is nothing quite so inaccessible and impenetrably rural as a ploughing match. Llangattock is unusual in holding its event alongside the village show, with competitions for giant pumpkins and Swiss rolls and chutney, and even a display of military vehicles, which added a faint and improbable hint of May Day in Moscow.

It is a fair bet, though, that many of the families slurping their ice creams outside the produce tent never made it into the next field, where the main business was taking place. They might not even have got a glimpse.

But there, cresting the brow of the next hill, was a field full of almost 60 ploughmen (and one ploughwoman) engaged in the ancient pursuit of tilling the soil. Their equipment ranged from horse-drawn and pedestrian-operated ploughs, through vintage Fergusons and Fordson tractors older than their owners, to modern machines: great flashy things with teeth. Against the backdrop of the gently crinkly and wooded Monmouthshire countryside, they made a wondrous sight. However, as a spectator sport, ploughing does have one or two drawbacks.

Even after several hours’ interrogation of everyone involved, I remained somewhat hazy about the details. A ploughing match is not a race, so, provided their allotted patches are not too large, the competitors have time to chat and sometimes even sit down for a coffee. Nor is it just about straightness. The rules produced nationally by the Society of Ploughmen list eight separate skills to be assessed by the judges: opening; start (which is not the same thing); seed bed; firmness; uniformity; finish; ins and outs; and general appearance. For the modern, reversible tractors, there is also “joining furrows and butts” and “accuracy of final furrow”. Judging TV dancing competitions is a doddle by comparison.

In the words of one judge, Douglas Read: “Not being straight is the cardinal sin,” which might stand as a broader truth about rural life. But a crooked ploughman is a particular problem in these contests because the essence of them is a complex process of alignment with the neighbouring competitor.

If your neighbour’s boundary isn’t straight, you have to sort it out or lose points yourself. This involves a process of collaboration that is not quite competition and not quite co-operation – mutual respect sometimes tinged with irritation. Thus it always is with farm boundaries.

“He didn’t get it straight, and he’s bloody good,” one man grumbled to me, nodding at his neighbour. “So he got it wrong?” “I wouldn’t say that. Just wasn’t straight.”

Yet many, maybe most, of the competitors, are not actually farmers, more like farmers manqué. As a teenager, Ralph Horner from Abergavenny told his father he was going to work on his grandfather’s farm. The old man insisted he learned a trade instead and won the argument. Horner spent his life as a fitter. Was his dad right? “One of the few times,” he said grudgingly.

And there was Alister Allan, 75 and a retired agronomist, who brings his modern Chinese-built Shire and rather more ancient plough down from Scotland every summer to compete on the early autumn circuit round the Welsh marches. But why? It’s hardly the money: first prize is £30. “It’s just the soil flowing over,” he says dreamily. “Making the furrows look beautiful and uniform and even and straight. Once you’re doing it, you forget about everything else.”

This may be an obscure sporting circuit but it extends all the way up to a world championship – to be held in Slovenia next month. And there were champions all around us, all having fun. The soil was yielding nicely and, of course, the weather helped. At the European Vintage Championships in Denmark the other week it rained like crazy. “Miserable,” said Mike Watkins of Rotherham, who lost the title he had won there in 2008.

By a pleasing coincidence, the Abergavenny Food Festival was on just a few miles down the road from Llangattock, so an assiduous spectator might have made a weekend of it, watching both start and finish of the nutritional process: the ploughmen preparing the soil that produces the wheat which delivers the flour – so the cooks can show the foodies how to make Welsh pancakes.

But the two ends of the process have become eerily detached from each other in the public mind. Does a contest like this actually mean anything? “In today’s world? Probably not,” Douglas Read admitted. “With the modern machinery, you’ve got so much power it doesn’t matter. In the old days you had to plough the land properly before the winter so the frost could break the soil down. With 200 horsepower you can just force the seedbed.”

And these contraptions can do 50 acres a day so a farmer no longer needs to employ a ploughman; a vintage Fergie with 25 horsepower might do four acres a day – whereas the traditional one-horsepower machine (to wit, one horse) might do one acre. So it all seems less relevant.

Yet, though the tractors have changed, the principles of the plough have remained unchanged for centuries: the ploughshare to cut underneath the furrow, the coulter to cut the side, and the mouldboard to turn the soil.

But the world has changed, and so has the countryside. And that, for Ray Bowen, treasurer of the Llangattock society, is why the event does matter. This contest dates back to 1888, collapsed in the 1970s, was revived to mark the centenary and clings on. But now it’s easier to find old tractors than young ploughmen.

“We’re short of numbers,” says Bowen. “In the competitions, the 50-year-olds are really young boys these days, and a lot of the judges are in their seventies. There were always loads of kids that helped out in the farms – they aren’t there these days. We had a class in the competition for the under-26s and didn’t have a single entry.

“We do hedging and shearing competitions and they’re thriving. But it’s a struggle with the ploughing. It’s hard to arrange any of the events because there aren’t the people around any more. The pubs are all closing. A lot of the Young Farmers’ Clubs have gone. And if we lose days like this, how are we going to hold the fabric of the countryside together?”

matthew.engel@ft.com
Matthew Engel’s dispatch appears fortnightly