Ploughing on with Liam O'Driscoll

Anyone who has attended a ploughing match will know how much time and effort goes into creating near-perfect furrows by the competitors. Depth, uniformity and straightness are all paramount to success.

But surely, with such an exertion of effort required on the home farm, heels can be kicked up when the job itself needs to be done? Not for accomplished ploughman Liam O’Driscoll: that’s for certain.

“I would do all my own ploughing to match standard. It’s very important to do it right, you save a lot afterwards in weed control, sprays and everything like that. I would never drive on. It’s in me, I have to do it right,” says Liam earnestly.

Liam comes from a long line of established ploughmen just outside Kilbrittan in west Cork. He switched from tillage to grassland farming a number of years ago. Arriving at his home, the first greeting Irish Country Living gets is from the Massey Ferguson 4707 in which he was crowned European Reversible Ploughing champion this summer. A handy size tractor, some might say.

The championships took place in Russia from 23 to 24 June, so the tractor is only a short time back on Irish soil. The next welcome we receive is from Liam, his wife Caroline and their four children: Laoise (nine), Michael (five), Saoirse (three) and eight-month-old JT.

Having bought the Massey at the beginning of 2017, Liam now uses only this tractor for competitions and, with the success he’s had, there’s not much heavy-duty work involved for the machine. “That tractor went in a container about four weeks before the Europeans and it took about five weeks to come home, so it isn’t long back,” explains Liam.

“She’s basically new still, like. She does a bit of hedge cutting in the summer. You would be kind of sparing her alright, you would want to keep it fairly good behind on the linkages. You wouldn’t want to be wearing them too much. She’s herself well paid for now anyway.”

Along with his trusty Massey, Liam brought another tractor home from overseas, a substantially bigger one. For winning gold in the reversible category of the European Ploughing Championships, he received a Russian-made articulated 240hp Kirovets tractor.

We joke that he could nearly use it to transport his Massey to and from Tullamore this year.

Competition time

Having gone to Russia for the Europeans, Offaly isn’t too far to travel for the National Ploughing Championships next week. Along with the silverware he collected this summer, Liam also came third in the 2009 World Ploughing Championships. He has won the National Ploughing once in the senior competition and twice in the under-28 category.

The dogs on the street know he’ll be a contender in Screggan but, humble as ever, Liam remarks that he’ll concentrate on his first round of ploughing on Wednesday and take nothing for granted. The man who taught Liam to plough, his father Jackie, will also be competing next week, as will his sister-in-law, Rachel.

“My father taught me to plough,” reflects the European champion. “I was following him since I was very small, learning from him all the time. ’Twas an early start, but it paid in the long run.”

Chatting in the sitting room, baby JT gurgles contentedly on his father’s lap. After sometime, JT is put in his walker and, flying around the place, it’s clear he’ll be mad for the road when he’s older. Michael has just started senior infants and is tractor mad too. Laoise and Soairse confer and eventually agree that they prefer ponies to tractors, but Laoise contemplates that she would like a cob some day to pull a plough.

Liam started competitively ploughing at the age of 17. This initiation was at the 1999 Ploughing Championships in Castletownroche, where he come second in the senior reversible. It was a good start, Liam recalls, and a wet year, conditions he began to favour.

The Child of Prague certainly won’t be out on the O’Driscoll’s window overlooking Courtmacsherry Bay next week. “It kind of suits me, anytime it’s wet I seem to go better,” says Liam. “Some ploughmen would say that, like last year on the Wednesday it was desperate altogether, but I was the best in the stubble that day.”

Ploughing his own furrow

Although Liam’s family is steeped in ploughing tradition, he ploughed his own furrow. His father and three brothers all plough or ploughed in the conventional class, while Liam has always competed in the reversible class.

“In reversible you have a totally different job to do compared to conventional, you have to plough into a short angle and come in square again,” Liam explains. “In the conventional you are ploughing a square plot. In the reversible you are ploughing a plot that is shorter on one side than the other.”

Even though Liam and his brothers were eventually to go on and compete in different classes, it was together they always prepared.

“We would have been practising a lot at home, more so when we were younger, now it’s hard to get time. You just go up there for a half hour and that’s it. We did loads of practice when we were young.

“Now even the neighbours there give me bits of ground as well, you have to go into different fields to be used to the different soils. You could be going very well here in one field, then you head to the All-Ireland and it’s no good. You would have to try three or four different fields.

“This is all grass now here, it’s a bit of a problem trying to get stubble ground, but my neighbour has a lot of tillage and my brother has tillage over the road as well. I would be reseeding a field every year anyway.”

Like any competitive sport, it’s all down to practice. For Liam, practising while he works exemplifies the origins of match ploughing, proving the pride you have in your work.

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