The two-day Hastings County Plowing Match and Farm Show can best be described as a mini International Plowing Match (IPM). It has many similarities. There’s a big field where you park your vehicle and hop aboard an enclosed hay wagon that takes you right to the entrance gate. There’s only one entrance gate. No confusion with one entrance. There’s only one parking field for visitors and it’s close to the event. Seven dollars gets you in.
Two farm buddies and I drove out to the Hastings event last week that was held along the 401 at Trenton in the beautiful Quinte West, at the farm of Jim and Janice Sandercock and family.
Jim Sandercock must have been very worried about rainy weather the week of the match because it was a very soggy August weekend in 1997 when the Sandercocks hosted their first Hastings County Plowing Match and Farm Show. He recalled it started raining the second day and went until the next morning. He said it was a real mess.
Sandercock said that approximately 150 acres of land was tied up for the match this year — 78 acres for the events and tent city, and 32 acres for parking beside the event.
Enclosed hay wagons (the kind you see at the IPM) went back and forth all day long picking people up in the parking lot and returning them to their vehicles in the afternoon. I noticed that many people with children were leaving around 3 p.m. When we went to the gate to leave at 4:30 there was hardly anyone there to get on a wagon. A tractor with two young fellows came along with a wagon and they took the three of us right to our vehicle. It was a well-organized event. At a huge farm show in Illinois that we attended last summer, we had to walk and walk to get to and from our vehicle until we managed to flag down a guy driving an all-terrain vehicle who gave us a lift.
When you are at an event where you walk a lot you don’t want to be walking a great distance to get back to your vehicle. I enjoy going to events and usually book a hotel if it’s a distance from home. At this Hastings event we had booked a hotel in Trenton that had a swimming pool. One of the first things I did when we got to the hotel was to go into the pool for a swim and soak the tired feet.
There were media and dignitaries classes, 4-H plowing, antiques, an antique tractor parade, horse plowing. Tented City had something for everyone with approximately 300 exhibitors on numerous streets displaying farm related equipment. There was a live band playing old vintage songs that people enjoyed very much. The tent was filled every time I walked by.
As for rain, the sky was threatening around noon the first day of the event. It did rain for half an hour but there were lots of tents for people to go under and sit down. The sun shone brightly again after the downpour and it was ……you know what…a plowing match and rain showers seem to go together.
Remember, the Renfrew County Plowing Match is Saturday, September 16 at the farm of Mel and Lynne Langton on Sturgeon Mountain Road.
