Plough Monday 

Traditionally, Plough Monday is the first Monday in January after Epiphany which in fact is today. This is an old agricultural celebration which seems to have emerged sometime in the fifteenth century and represents the return to work for farming communities.

As such, it was both a practical and symbolic festival. In churches, the priest would light candles, “plough lights,” to bless the farmworkers but it was also a social celebration with music forming an integral part of the revelry. A boiled suet pudding comprised of a meat and onion mixture was made and eaten – unsurprisingly called ‘Plough Pudding’.

Farming is the oldest industry in the world. In the beginning ‘ploughing’ was just the action of dragging sticks through the land to break it up before scattering seeds.

From this, the process  developed into using an open shallow plough pushing soil to one side before eventually a plough was developed which cut a long slice and turned it upside down thus covering the grass over into the earth to rot down and thereby aerate the soil.

During Anglo Saxon times at Highclere, every tenant had to make his own plough in order to be entitled to till the land and the remains of their techniques can still be discerned in the ridge and furrow marks which are preserved in the parkland and downland around the Castle.

The majority of Anglo-Saxon people grew most of what they ate and ate most of what they grew. Livestock and arable farming were indispensable to one another. Arable crops depended on the manure and labour of animals which in turn fed on the products of arable land as well as the land which was lying fallow. The word for field 1,200 years ago was acre and that was also what a man and a horse could plough in a day.

Ploughs changed little until the 18^th century when the first factory ploughs were produced. The Rotherham swing plough of 1730 was followed by Robert Ransome’s plough of 1789. A third Englishman, James Small, improved the design still further before, in 1837, John Deere in the USA introduced a steel plough which allowed ploughing to take place where it had been too challenging to do until that point in time.

Farming – sowing and harvesting – are the central requirements of life and human existence but tractors and combine harvesters have only been around for the last one hundred years and they have changed the earth. For millennia, most of the global population was involved in working the land using horses or bullocks – it was both slow and labour intensive work which involved most families in any community.

Today, it is just a nostalgic dream to imagine the enormous shire horses hitched to a plough followed by the farmer feeling the balance of the ground, knowing when to bear down on the handles, or lean to the right or left, lightly steering the moldboard to cut through the earth of the field.

Ploughs pulled by a horse would invert only 10cm of soil but the modern plough behind a tractor will invert 20-25cm of soil. Today ploughing sometimes has to be even deeper as the soil is compacted and damaged by the weight of the heavy machinery.

To plough or not to plough that is the question…

Regenerative farming is so called as it avoids ploughing altogether, claiming it damages earthworms and fungal hyphae as well as increasing carbon loss and leaving plants without roots. Regenerative agriculture drills directly into the soil without removing vegetation but then may well have to use more herbicides to remove the weeds which would otherwise compete with the crops. Of course, those herbicides may well cause considerable damage themselves, killing parts of the soil’s ecosystem which would  otherwise be better preserved.

Every generation makes its own changes and Highclere has been operating a no till and direct drill approach in an effort to avoid disturbing the soil structure.

I am not sure there is any one right answer but I do think the more understanding we have the better. Where ever we live, we need to think of this earth….quite literally in this case.