THE STICKS—Ahhh — big breath — that fresh country scent.

Manure.

Honest fertilizing s---. Not to be mistaken for the malodorous stuff that’s been slung around the Ontario legislature in recent days.

The city girl fills her lungs.

Probably the only person among thousands present who has arrived at the International Plowing Match and Rural Expo by cab.

Here, on Tuesday, as a fly on the wall. Or a fly on the dung.

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“You can catch the shuttle,” suggests a volunteer.

Wow, a shuttle? How very accommodating on a scorching September morning.

Except it’s a wagon, hauled by a tractor, bouncing over the rutted path.

Makes sense, the city girl figures. This is tractor country after all. At many nearby farms, tractors are parked in front yards as decorative displays, along with all the harvest adornments, whimsical scarecrows and such.

The city girl finds herself humming “Farmer’s Song” by Murray McLauchlan: “Straw hats and old dirty hankies/Mopin’ a face like a shoe/Thanks for the meal here’s a song that is real/From the kid from the city to you.”

Dismounting into the middle of a parade, right behind the NDP wagon, where Opposition Leader Andrea Horwath and her lefty colleagues, in bright orange windbreakers, wave at the crowd and toss apples. Trailed by vintage Cougar, atop which perch the Queen of the Furrow and the Chatham-Kent Queen of the Furrow.

Horwath, the city girl is told, is reigning champion of the pol plowing contest. She’s more than just a chronically furrowed brow.

Greeted with homespun warmth at the main stage tent where a band of geezers has been entertaining the audience, stomping country tunes. (The city girl reminds herself — still, younger than the Rolling Stones.)

But Horwath and the Greens — and, somewhere, the rump that is all that’s left of the Liberals — are not the main draw at the vast farm, owned by Jean-Marie (“King of Brussels Sprouts” and Lucille Laprise, hosts this year of the 101st Expo, purportedly the largest event of its kind in the world, and never missed by provincial politicians. Indeed, blocked out on the schedule, forcing an overnight session at Queen’s Park on the weekend for emergency reading of Bill 31, because we can’t have MPPs sending their regrets to farmers.

Premier Doug Ford is the rock star.

Tramping around the grounds of Tented City — not to be confused with Tent City in Toronto, the now-and-then homeless bivouacs that sprout up downtown — in jeans and event polo shirt, posing for endless selfies with well-wishers, shaking hands and patting babies.

We forget, those of us who live in the centre of the universe, most especially the “downtown elites” Ford reviles, that the premier isn’t so dimly viewed elsewhere in the province.

Ford is having a very good day.

“He looks better in person,” one fellow tells a reporter.

Very much a Ford-crowd: White, elderly, conservative, a rural microcosm of Ford Nation.

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Which is kind of weird because Etobicoke-raised Ford has zero in common with these good folks, the businessman-turned-politician-turned-premier although he slangs a good game.

The Ontario that’s in Ford’s wheelhouse. No record number of murders here, in a place called Pain Court where even the crabgrass grows in tidy rows. No gangbangers. No support for gun bans.

No raucous protesters either, condemning the government running roughshod over democratic rights by threatening to invoke that “notwithstanding” stuff, although presumably Ford is being kept apprised of matters unfolding at the Court of Appeal, where the government is at this very moment requesting a stay of last week’s lower court ruling which (fleetingly) threw a wrench into Ford’s plan to slash Toronto city council.

Just a couple of guys unfurling a banner that reads: DON’T PLOW OUR CHARTER.

Heads pivoted when a solitary heckler shouted something or other. Ford plowed right through it.

“They hopped in their car from downtown, the NDP, and drove up here,” Ford declared accusingly. Which seems an odd dis for someone who’s so devoted to automobiles over cycles. Not a single pedal-head in sight.

“If you want to see the lifeblood of Ontario’s economy, all you have to do is drive through Southwestern Ontario,” Ford told his audience from the stage “You can see it for yourself, the farmers, the factory towns, small-business workers, local workers working hard to pay the bills, to create jobs and to make ends meet. These are the industries, the farmers and the workers who put Ontario on the map.

“I love farmers.”

Says the man with the strangely big head who’s likely never turned a clump of sod in his life.

Really, who doesn’t love farmers, subsidized or not? They put food on our table. This area alone — No. 1 producer of carrots, seed corn, tomatoes, pumpkins and of course brussels sprouts — kicks $3 billion into the provincial economy.

And the porta-potties are gender-neutral.

The pols then descended on the plowing fields to take their turns in the furrow match, heartily cheered for their competitive style by generously non-partisan spectators. While the city girl pours over the seven-pages of rules for mules, horses and humans, trying to make sense of “splits” and “crowns” and “sighting stakes” and “leave stones plowed up where they are.”

It’s not all about the furrowing, of course. There’s a rodeo, auctions, quilt exhibits, a bewildering display of farming implements, hand-tooled leather kitsch and, this year, several attempts at setting Guinness World Records: Yesterday, Largest Egg and Spoon Race. Over the next four days, largest sugar cube structure, most people bobbing for apples at one time, most people eating corn on the cob at one time, longest quilt binding and world’s largest Caesar, which the city girl is sorry to miss.

But she’s particularly charmed by the dancing tractors, manipulated by men in women’s dresses. In Toronto, we call that cross-dressing.

The city girl sits on a bale of hay, sticks a straw in her mouth — wiping it down first with a tissue — to ponder events thoughtfully.

Mostly, she would like to come back here under cover of darkness and mow crop circles, throw all those rigid rows for a loop.

City girl is an alien.

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