On 31 August, the night before the first day of the World Ploughing Championship, the bar of the Hotel Fortuna in the small German town of Reutlingen was crammed with the global ploughing elite. The scene resembled a low-key United Nations afterparty – Swiss, Kenyans, Australians, Latvians, Canadians and French, all slugging back long glasses of German beer. The top flight of international ploughing is a limited pool, the same faces recurring every year, and so the atmosphere was jovial, like a school reunion, 50-odd ploughmen and two ploughwomen (the sport has historically been dominated by men) hailing each other affectionately across the room. Much of the talk concerned the wild boar who had apparently dug up the field where the following day’s competition would take place. But there was something else in the air too, a bonhomie edged with rivalry. They were here to win.

The two English competitors, Mick Chappell and Ashley Boyles, stood to one side with their families. Chappell is 57, Boyles 35, but it was the younger man who bid everyone goodnight and went up to bed early. Boyles takes his ploughing very seriously. Chappell, a man more inclined to Freddie Flintoff-style bouts of prolonged revelry, leaned against a wall, finished a pint and readily accepted the offer of another. Earlier in the summer, he had told me he would prepare for the world championship by drinking five pints the night before. When asked if any other international athlete adopted a similar strategy ahead of a major competition, he disputed the terms: “I wouldn’t say athlete.”

Competitive ploughing is unquestionably a sport, in that it’s an organised physical activity with a governing body and strict rules, but it’s fair to say that the physique of a world-class ploughman doesn’t immediately call to mind a Novak Djokovic or a Cristiano Ronaldo. Ploughing – after sufficient immersion – can quietly thrill in its display of precision and technique, but it is not a pastime that requires fitness or even a healthy BMI. One recent winner of the annual British Ploughing Championship was 82 years old. Boyles has the build of a retired scrum-half; Chappell wears glasses and has a heavy limp – he lost his left leg to a sugar-beet harvester at the age of 17. (In what has become Chappell family lore, he hopped back to his tractor and drove to the farm for help, blood seeping from his stump, his severed leg still in the harvester.)

Ashley Boyles, who competed for England at the 2018 World Ploughing Championships, at home in Lincolnshire. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

The following day, Chappell and Boyles would mount their tractors, ploughs rigged to the back, and spend four hours inverting the soil on a plot of land to create a sequence of furrows, burying the old crop and making a seed bed for the new. Nothing would happen very quickly, the event closer to test cricket than a sprint. But, if ploughing somehow lacks as a sport in terms of speed or jeopardy, it also exceeds other sports’ parameters. Like archery, say, it’s an ancient skill, but where archery has lapsed into hobby, ploughing remains a real-life job, one that has been performed for millennia. It’s the oldest profession in the world – second oldest, ploughmen like to say, if you count prostitution.

The plough often features in exhibitions and radio shows (The History of the World in 100 Objects; 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy) as a handy plot point in the history of human development. But, as objects go, it was genuinely transformative: we were hunter-gatherers until we learned to drag a stick through the earth, plant seeds and grow stuff. The plough turned us into farmers; it made us civilised. And, like many things we have unquestioningly done to the earth for a long time, ploughing has also made us complicit in our own destruction. The heavy modern plough, churning ever deeper into the earth, may be ruining our soil.

Back in the Fortuna bar, Chappell finished his pint and surveyed the competition. “Ireland and Northern Ireland,” he said, in his curt Yorkshire accent. The Irish always seem to win. “And the Swiss.” He nodded at a young man with vibrantly rosy cheeks sitting on a bar stool surrounded by his countrymen. “That one.” Chappell felt he was in with a good chance, though, the way a sportsman does before a competition actually begins. This was his moment.

The Irish are so good at ploughing, one grudging ploughman told me, because they don’t have anything better to do at the weekend. A more plausible explanation is that, unlike in most countries, ploughing retains a certain status in Ireland. The national championship – known simply as the Ploughing – is a major annual event, presided over by 84-year-old Anna May McHugh, Queen of the Ploughing (the title of her memoir, published last year). The queen’s daughter, Anna Marie, is now the general secretary of the World Ploughing Organisation, and in the ploughing world there is a general sense of the Irish being in charge, of Ireland being the sport’s natural home. The Ploughing isn’t a novelty activity, but one of the largest outdoor events in Europe, attended by almost 300,000 people over three days. Politicians turn up, knowing it’s a helpful place to be seen. Dubliners come for a day out. There is sponsorship from major brands such as Aldi and Coca-Cola. Unlike in the British nationals, which are sponsored by a tyre company, the competitors win prize money and financial support to compete internationally.

In Britain, as with any other untelevised niche sport with an extremely limited fanbase, there is precious little money in ploughing. Bar a little help from the Society of Ploughmen, the competitors pay their own expenses (about £3,000 to go to Germany: transporting the tractor and plough on a lorry, paying for the hotel, food, beer). In the 1800s, when neighbouring squires pitted their best ploughmen against each other in local matches, the winners would have been heroes, won a year’s wages from their boss and would be traded between farms like Premier League footballers. Today, ploughmen arrange charity matches for each other to cover their costs. The crowds, when they come, tend to gravitate towards the vintage ploughing, charmed by horses and steam, rather than watching men on tractors drive slowly up and down a field.

Vintage ploughing at the 68th British National Ploughing Championships in Warwickshire in October. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

For most people, the reality of ploughing is remote. Farming is no longer a dominant profession in the UK: around 1.5% of British workers are now employed in agriculture, a drop from 22% in 1841. A third of British children aren’t sure where milk comes from, so it seems unlikely they would be familiar with the curve of a furrow. But leave a city and farmers still plough, year after year. The land hasn’t shrunk: almost three quarters of British ground (around 17.5m hectares, or 43m acres) is used in agriculture and of this, a third is for arable farming, or crops. Much of that portion will be regularly ploughed.

Two months before the world championships, I had watched Chappell and Boyles practise their ploughing on fields 40 miles apart – Chappell in Yorkshire, Boyles in Lincolnshire. Chappell was ploughing on the 800-hectare farm where he works as a contractor, Boyles in a neighbour’s field opposite his house. Both men grew up on farms, driving tractors from the age of six, but Boyles’s family eventually gave up farming and set up in haulage – better money, easier life. Boyles retained a love of tractors and the kind of life-devouring devotion to ploughing that, as with much sport done at the highest level for no money and no audience, seems both absurd and wonderful to anyone not touched by the obsession.

If Chappell is the one-legged maverick of English ploughing, then Boyles is its more earnest young pretender – the Björn Borg to Chappell’s John McEnroe. He’s the kind of ploughman who makes notes while he is ploughing and has a competitive spirit that can sap pleasure from the most inconsequential pastime. “I couldn’t take up golf as something to do at the weekend,” he told me, almost regretfully. “I’d have to enter competitions and be the best in the golf club.”

Chappell takes a more freewheeling approach. He likes to plough by instinct, rather than the book, more likely to smoke than take notes. While practising, he was almost always at some stage of engagement with a cigarette – lighting one, chucking one under his tractor after a single drag, or letting one dangle unlit between his lips while he fiddled with something on his plough. Chappell likes to say, with a smile that hovers at the edge of his mouth like a plane trying but never quite able to land, that he has a three-course breakfast: a coffee, a fag and a cough.

Mick Chappell, who is part of one of Britain’s most prominent ploughing families. Photograph: Kubota UK

When you first watch someone plough, the technical skill honed over a lifetime isn’t immediately obvious. The ploughman drives his tractor and the plough drags behind and seems to do all the work. A disc on the plough slices through the earth, creating the wall of the furrow. A small metal plate, the ploughshare, cuts into the earth, and a larger curved plate, the mouldboard, inverts the soil, burying the remains of the old crop and any lingering weeds.

Watch for longer, though, and you start to notice the intricacy involved – the way a ploughman has to make endless tiny mechanical adjustments to his plough to ensure the furrows are straight and tidy, no weeds poking through. Ploughmen often talk about cleanliness – a clean base to the furrow, a clean seam where the furrows meet – and good ploughing has a kind of startling purity, as though nature has finally been disciplined into straight lines. A well-ploughed plot, like much sporting excellence, should look as if a robot must have been its architect, not the wayward human hand.

“Some people say it’s an art form,” Boyles told me in the summer, standing on his furrows, nudging their solid curves with his boot. “When it’s nice ploughing, it’s like it’s painted on. You see it afterwards and it’s like … ” He searched for the word that might capture the particular kind of aesthetic pleasure and profound satisfaction that comes from something delicate and precise being wrought from a clunking piece of machinery attached to a 12-tonne tractor with wheels the size of boulders. “Aaah.”

Early in the morning on day one of the world championship, a long trail of cars lined the wooded drive into Hofgut Einsiedel, the vast farm where the competition would take place. Hundreds of spectators were already spreading out around the fields, forming patient queues at bratwurst stalls. An off-duty choir in green lederhosen were arrayed on some hay bales. Chappell and Boyles were in their tractors, ready to start.

Over the next four hours, the two men would plough their furrows on a field of stubble, the remains of a crop that has been harvested. They would be watched by three-man teams of judges who would assess the neatness, straightness, width, depth and aesthetic quality of their ploughing. The pair were competing in different classes, using different kinds of ploughs – Chappell with a reversible and Boyles with a conventional. (The reversible plough, manipulated by a set of hydraulic levers, can flip over at the end of each furrow, allowing the ploughman to plough up and down his plot of land. The more old-fashioned conventional plough can’t flip, but stays in the same position, requiring the ploughman to plough around his plot instead.) The following day, they would return to plough on grassland – a less forgiving surface, where every wonky furrow is obvious to the spectator. The scores from the two days would then be amalgamated, and the winner in each class crowned world champion at the gala dinner in the evening.

Ashley Boyles aboard his tractor and plough. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Chappell and Boyles’s plots, each marked by a St George’s cross flapping in the wind, were on opposite sides of a wide path running down the middle of the field separating the 26 plots of conventional from 28 plots of reversible. At one end of Chappell’s plot, his parents, Ken and Anne, and his sister, Sue, were already stationed on green folding chairs. The Chappells are like the Redknapps or the Nevilles of ploughing, a dominant family in the sport. The surname reverberates: sometimes a gift, sometimes a weight. Sue is the Society of Ploughmen’s secretary, Uncle David also competes, and Ken is the sport’s retired emperor. In his time, Ken was a champion ploughman, served on the World Ploughing Board, wrote the judges’ ploughing manual and generally shaped competitive ploughing as it is known today. When Mick won the British National Ploughing Championship last year, and secured his place at the world championship, Ken watched, beaming, as his son finished off an exemplary plot. “He were happier than I was,” said Mick, who more naturally takes an Eeyore-ish pleasure in mild misfortune.

Spaced out along the field, each ploughman on his own plot, were the Englishmens’ rivals. On the reversible side, Chappell had his eye on the northern Irishman, Thomas Cochrane. On the conventional, the runaway favourite was Eamonn Tracey, a tall, ruddy Irishman who had either won or been runner-up in the past four world championships. At the far end of the field was the unknown quantity, the US’s Hailey Gruber, 16 years old and one of the two women competing. In the kind of twist that would greenlight a biopic in any mainstream sport, Gruber had beaten her own father, last year’s world champion, to qualify.

Just before 10am, all eyes were on the lights on a stand in the corner of the field, still on red. Soon, they would turn amber, which meant five minutes to go, and then eventually green. The competitors would then have 20 minutes to complete their first furrow, before an hour-long break while the judges came round to assess the openings, and then a further two hours and 40 minutes to complete their plot. If anyone failed to finish their plot in the allotted time, they would be docked points.

A large, sloping field doesn’t quite have the contained, taut atmosphere of a stadium before a starting gun is fired. There was no ceremonial hush when the lights turned amber. Kids chased each other over a giant tractor parked on a path. Spectators ate German-style onion pizza off paper plates. It was only by watching the competitors themselves that you sensed something was about to begin. They sat, silent and upright in their tractor seats, engines running, ready to drop their ploughs into the earth. The waiting was Chappell’s worst bit. Once the lights turned amber, Boyles always sang the national anthem quietly to himself, his only pre-match ritual. You could see him mouthing the words.

At last: green.

Ploughing is no rush-out-of-the-gates sport. Ploughmen often compare it to Formula One because of how essential the machinery is to their success, but that must be where the similarity ends. Almost as soon as the competitors had inched off the starting line, they all stopped again, hopping off their tractors with their measuring tapes and spanners, fiddling at their ploughs. Measuring is half the sport: in competition, the plots adjoin each other, and everyone has to plough a prescribed number of furrows neatly up to their neighbour. Get the measurements wrong and you end up with the wrong number, or uneven widths. The judges would be brutal about sloppiness of any kind – wheel marks, footprints, visible weeds or ragged edges would all be harshly penalised.

Although they were technically competing against each other, all of them seemed locked in a dance with their gear and the ground, aware only of the relationship between the two. Much of their time was spent facing backwards, turned around in the tractor seat to monitor the vital work taking place in the furrow behind them, eyes fixed on the turning soil.

Boyles sometimes compares the sport to snooker. Once underway, the ploughman is trapped in singular, introverted concentration. John Hill, a ploughing grandee, three-time world champion and current chair of the British Society of Ploughmen, compared it to figure skating – you start from a point of perfection and lose points for mistakes that are as obvious and irredeemable as a sprawl on the ice. The sport’s authorities seemed to borrow from the Tour de France. At the end of the first day’s ploughing, the leading ploughman in each class is given a yellow jersey to wear the next day. To my eyes, ploughing’s closest relation was MasterChef. There seemed to be a similar mix of elements – time pressure, an activity undertaken simultaneously but separately from your rivals, your fate ultimately dependent on the subjective tastes of the judges. This comparison never seemed to resonate particularly well with the ploughmen.

‘Bad ploughing done straight is better than good ploughing done bent’ … the World Ploughing Championships 2018. Photograph: Kuratorium Weltpflügen 2018 EV

In the first 20 minutes of the competition, Boyles put on an exemplary display. To the untrained eye, his first furrow appeared immaculate, Roman. But he wasn’t happy. “Would help if it was straight,” he muttered, as he waited for the judges to come round. A few plots down, a small crowd had already gathered to watch Eamonn Tracey. The Irishman’s opening was almost tediously well-executed, his first furrow straight as a beam.

Over on the reversible side, Ken Chappell was looking solemn. His son, Mick, having finished his first furrow, was having a fag and joking with a steward bringing sandwiches: “Two beers, please!” Mick had got off to a quick start, but something was awry with the setting of his plough. Ken told me about competing in the 1968 world championships in what was then Rhodesia, when the stubble was so brittle it broke off and jumped. Experience was everything, being able to adapt to local conditions.

Ken gazed at his son’s plot. “Bad ploughing done straight is better than good ploughing done bent,” he said, ominously, repeating a favourite mantra. In ploughing, straightness is all. No flaw is more obvious than a bend. About five yards down Chappell’s first furrow, there it was: an unmistakable swerve.

Since the Iron Age, the fundamentals of ploughing haven’t changed much. But of course the instrument itself, and how we pull it, has transformed. After dragging the plough by hand, farmers upgraded to oxen more than 4,000 years ago, then horses, then steam ploughs and finally, less than a century ago, tractors. With a pair of horses and a plough made by the village blacksmith, a 19th-century ploughman could work almost half a hectare a day. Chappell, sitting on his Japanese-made Kubota tractor and pulling his Norwegian-made Kverneland plough, can cover 80 hectares by lunch. With horses to look after, there would have been 50 men working an 800-hectare farm. Today Chappell is one of three.

The modern, industrial plough, dragged by a 168-horsepower tractor, can carve eight to 12 furrows at a time. A growing movement of conservationists believe that the sheer might of this machinery is responsible for destroying the soil’s organic matter by digging too deeply into the earth. “The soil is a mixture of inert minerals and living creatures, a wonderful world of superhighways and information paths,” a leading conservationist farmer, John Cherry, told me. “Then you come along with a plough, turn it all upside-down and destroy it.”

Cherry, a tall loping man with an air of contented chaos about him, farms 1,000 hectares of chalky boulder clay in Hertfordshire with his brother, Paul. For years, the pair ploughed until they began to notice that their soil was not just declining in quality, but vanishing. Ploughing leaves the soil bare, exposing it to rain and wind. “It was eroding away,” said Cherry, “disappearing into the ditch.” The pair reduced how much they ploughed and then stopped altogether, becoming a “no-till” farm where the new crop is planted over the remains of the last. The soil remains undisturbed, its inhabitants and ecosystem protected.

The European Ploughing Championships 2018, which were held in St Truiden, Belgium in August. Photograph: Kuratorium Weltpflügen 2018 EV

So convinced is Cherry of the no-till method that three years ago, he launched Groundswell, a two-day summer festival held on his farm, where hundreds of farmers learn about conservation agriculture. Among Brazilian soil experts and English worm specialists, Cherry delivered an hour-long lecture, with slides, to a packed barn on the success story of no-tilling his own farm.

In Cherry’s vision, all farmers would switch to no-till and the plough itself would become a relic. “Our whole civilisation depends on us having healthy soil. We can’t afford to treat it with disdain,” he told me. His mission meets plenty of resistance: many farmers don’t want to change methods on which they’ve always relied. Nor is no-till perfect. As the plough no longer buries the weeds, no-till farmers still have to spray pesticides. You therefore can’t be both an organic farmer and no-till, as you still have to use chemicals. (To be both is the holy grail, as one ecologically minded farmer put it to me). But to the conservationists, spraying glyphosate is a minor interference compared with the aggressive upheaval caused by ploughing. Cherry likes to quote Franklin D Roosevelt’s 1937 letter to state governors after dust storms and floods had caused irreparable harm across rural America: “The nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself.”

After nearly four hours of competition, the amber light started to flash. Those taking part, if they hadn’t finished already, were now scampering around their ploughs making final adjustments, their movements suddenly hot-footed and rushed. At 2pm, the lights turned red. Boyles looked shattered, but pleased. “I’m reasonably happy,” he said. On the other side, Chappell was sunk in gloom. “I finished like I started,” he said. “Crap.”

That evening, a briefing took place in the Hotel Fortuna’s basement. Health and safety instructions were given about how the competitors should drive in convoy to minimise the risk of a tractor-spectator collision. Ken Chappell sat at the back and looked weary. He had little time for bureaucracy. When an official stood up to emphasise yet another rule, Ken muttered under his breath: “He’s never ploughed in his life.”

At last, they got to the bit everyone was waiting for – the announcement of the first day’s rankings. “Stupid idea,” said Boyles. It was bad for morale: if you had done badly the first day, there was little hope of clawing your way back on the second.

In the conventional, Boyles had come seventh – not bad, but not as high as he’d hoped. Politics, some muttered, comparing the judging process to Eurovision. He was one behind Hailey Gruber, who was darting around the room with delight, still years off being able to legally drink to celebrate. Eamonn Tracey went up to receive his yellow jersey with the look of a man who hadn’t expected anything less.

Chappell, meanwhile, was languishing in 18th place in the reversible. The top spots had gone, as he’d predicted, to the northern Irishman Thomas Cochrane and the two Swiss. He was disappointed. Tempting as it was, he couldn’t blame the tractor, the plough, the field or the wild boar. “It’s the pillock in the seat that’s the problem.”

Day two, grassland ploughing, and the rain started to teem down in the morning and never stopped. The crowds descended, swaddled in plastic. Clusters of glory hunters gathered at the foot of Tracey and Cochrane’s plots, and a camera crew set up to film Gruber. Chappell, vivid in a red, Kverneland-sponsored boiler suit, was sitting in his tractor looking wrecked. “He’s had the trots since four in the morning,” said his sister Sue. An upset stomach, little sleep. Ken and Anne looked anxious and damp.

The lights turned green and the ploughmen set off. Even though there were hours to go, so much seemed to rest on those opening minutes, that first incision into the earth. After a few suspended moments, no one wanted to be the first to say it. Anne peered at her son’s furrow. “That doesn’t look straight to me.”

At the 20-minute break, Ken went and stood at the foot of his son’s tractor and had a quiet word. But Mick didn’t seem keen to talk, leaning back in his seat with his eyes closed. Ken just kept standing there, staring into the drizzle.

For the next two hours, following Mick’s progress was not unlike watching Paula Radcliffe run that marathon at the 2004 Athens Olympics. Expectations dropped until they reached the point where you simply hoped he’d survive. He kept getting off and slowly limping around the plough, or stopping completely. There was no way he could finish in time.

The World Ploughing Championships 2018. Photograph: Kuratorium Weltpflügen 2018 EV

As the final minutes ticked by and Cochrane rounded off his faultless plot, Mick was still down the wrong end of the field with his tape measure out. Ken and Anne were watching in silence. Finally, Mick finished, five minutes over, and collapsed back in his seat. Anne gave him some glucose tablets while a trio of medics came along to check he was all right, causing a low-level buzz along the field in the way suffering only can in sport.

Boyles was still spannering away as the amber light flashed, and ploughed his last furrow with seconds to spare. Two days immersed in the sport was enough, it turned out, to find myself jumping up and down at the end of Boyles’s plot, shouting for him to get back on his tractor and bloody finish.

As the red light came on and Boyles dismounted, a small band of supporters gave him a clap and he waved and smiled the smile of someone whose body was releasing a year’s worth of tension, more liberated than joyful. All that build-up, and it was over. The question had to be asked, the one that every track-side commentator asks and you can’t understand why until you’re there and it’s all you want to know: how did he feel?

“Bit of a relief,” said Boyles, not one to overstate things. “Bit of sadness that you’ve got to load up and go home. Happy that I’ve not disgraced myself.”

The crowds streamed back to their cars. Chappell, finally, was off his tractor, cleaning his plough. What happened? “I don’t know,” he said, bemused. “I can’t remember half of it.” He’d felt awful, dizzy, disorientated. A steward had told him to give up. “I said, bugger off, I’m going to finish it. I didn’t come all this way to pack it in.” He looked stunned, as though still trying to fathom the calamity that had slowly unfolded on this small patch of earth over the last four hours. “I didn’t know where I were some of the time.”

The ploughmen started to drive their tractors off the field. Tracey was taking final pictures of his plot for posterity and chatting to admirers. “The rain softened it,” he told them. “Ah it did, yes. It just made it turn a little easier.” They nodded approvingly. “It’s a solid job,” Tracey continued, mostly to himself. “Ah yes. There’s not many mistakes in it, anyway.”

Boyles drove past Chappell’s plot and raised his hand in a sort of solidarity salute. “Go on,” shouted Chappell amiably over the roar of the engine, and waved him on.

What will happen to our land over the next generation or two will depend on what we do to it, and what we stop doing to it. There are bleak predictions: four years ago, Sheffield University researchers suggested that given the state of their soil, British farms only have 100 harvests left. But conservationists detect a moment of opportunity. As farmers face the disappearance of EU subsidies, no-till campaigner Cherry believes they are desperately looking to cut costs. No-till farming uses less diesel, less fertiliser. As well as preserving the soil, it’s cheaper. Every year, he said, more farmers were defecting to his side.

In a speech he gave in March this year, Defra secretary Michael Gove talked about giving no-till farmers support “to help control and reduce carbon emissions, demand for chemical inputs and provide a richer habitat for insects and invertebrates”. When he announced his agriculture bill in September, Gove set out how farming, post-Brexit, would in theory become a paid-for public good. The farmers who provide the greatest environmental benefit, including improved soil health, would receive the largest financial reward. Ploughing, in this vision, would no longer make a lot of sense.

Gove likes to talk about delivering a “green Brexit”, which may or may not be what Chappell and Boyles voted for when they opted to leave the EU. They were tired of the current system, of the sense that other farmers in other countries were getting more out of the EU than they were. “I thought it’d be better for the future,” Chappell told me earlier in the summer. “I’ve got 20-year-old kids and I thought it would be better for them.” Did his kids agree? “They didn’t.”

A few hours after the last tractor had left, Chappell sent a text: “Not going to the do tonight still feel a bit rough.” The do was the gala dinner and presentation of the trophies to the overall winners of the world championship. Ken stayed at the hotel to keep his son company, but the rest of the Chappells, Boyles and his wife were all there, dressed up and sitting at trestle tables in a barn, eating a three-course dinner as they waited to find out who had won. Ploughmen trooped outside to smoke impatiently.

Finally, general secretary McHugh took to the stage in a sparkling dress and invited the ploughmen up to sit behind her in neat rows – naturally – each one cheered as they took their place. After many dramatic pauses, McHugh announced the winners and surprised no one at all: in the reversible, Thomas Cochrane of Northern Ireland, and in the conventional, the inevitable Eamonn Tracey. Up they came to the podium, applause clattering off the barn walls, and accepted their trophies. Cochrane’s was a sort of gilt sword, Tracey’s a shining, golden plough on a wooden plinth. He lifted it to the sky.

The World Ploughing Championships 2018. Photograph: Kuratorium Weltpflügen 2018 EV

By 8am the following day, Chappell and Boyles were in the lorry and on the road. They got home the day after, and Chappell was back at work in the fields by 11. He sent a picture of his sprayer – a hulking machine that disseminates insecticide or weedkiller – engulfed in flames on the side of the road. “Electrical problem.” It hadn’t been the best week. In the final results of the championship, he’d come 22nd.

A week later, Boyles, who’d come fifth, was in post-match analysis mode. He’d learned a lot, he said in a text. “1. Equipment needs major improvement. 2. I need to train harder and put more time in.” He was going to Ireland to be a judge at the Ploughing, which would give him a chance to scrutinise Tracey’s methods. “It’s not a big scary thing to get in front of him,” he said. “I’ve beaten Eamonn before.”

When I spoke to Chappell, he was in the middle of irrigating potatoes and carrots, drilling wheat and barley. He was busy; he didn’t really want to think about Germany. “Well it were a bit of a disaster really, weren’t it?” he said. Down the phone, you could almost hear the heavy shrug. “There’s nowt I can do about it now.” Part of him wished he could have another go, but he was blessed with the optimistic propulsion of the true sportsman. There was always next year, another match, another field.

Most ploughmen can’t imagine not ploughing. Why would they stop doing something they had always done? Ploughing isn’t the habit of a lifetime so much as the habit of all time, embedded in our language, our constellations, our yoga positions, our hymns. Plough the fields and scatter. God speed the plough. Plough on. For many farmers, it is the natural, ancient way to work the earth, a very hard habit to break. As a ploughman once said to me: “The plough’s been here for far too long for it not to be right.”

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