A panel of three judges, including a former Conservative MP defeated in last year’s federal election, crowned Ally Ingram as Queen of the Furrow for Hastings County the other day.
The crowning ceremony took place in a big white tent in a hay field on the farm of Don McKinnon, which is on the Queensborough Road.
Queensborough, about 225 kilometres west of Ottawa, has four churches and was a bustling town on a train line at one time; these days it’s the sweetest little lost hamlet you will ever visit, with water flowing out of a mill pond over a mill race beside the old grist mill, plus an old clapboard hotel and a few carefully maintained houses.
Nothing as big as the Hastings County Plowing Match & Farm Show had come to Queensborough in a very long time. Pickup trucks jammed the little winding roads, and the McKinnons gave over several fields to parking. The local MP gave out apples and the Township of Madoc gave out shopping bags emblazoned with its crest and a reminder that it was home to Ontario’s first gold mine.
Antique Massey-Ferguson tractors competed to plough the straightest furrows. Old farmers used pitchforks to feed oats into a threshing machine powered by a long leather belt hooked up to a steam-powered engine, into which other farmers fed stovewood. The old machine purred like a kitten, and the guy running it let a little boy climb and pull the rope which blew the steam whistle; a comforting sound in these busy times.
It would all sound like a very quaint nod to the past except for the collosal new farm machines on display, from New Holland and Kubota and Massey Ferguson and John Deere; some of these tractors are as tall as a farmhouse, making the tractors from a couple of generations ago look like toys. Given the stats — “In less than a lifetime, Canada has moved form one in three Canadians living on a farm to one in fifty,” according to the Farm Show magazine — it makes sense that they need these gargantuan tractors, since each farmer needs to work a lot more land than his father did.
Ally Ingram, the Queen of the Furrow, won over the three-judge panel in part with a simple speech that reminded people how much we all love to eat, and that, when it comes down to it, we need farmers to grow us this food.
Long live the Canadian family farm.
