Ploughing Championships not on the tourist trail

As I mentioned in the twitter posts - you are reading those, aren't you? - I'm at the National Ploughing Championships in Athy, Co. Kildare. I've never been to this event before, although it's a huge attraction. The Ploughing Championships run over three days and this year's event is expected to attract 150,000 people.

The National Ploughing Championships are about a lot more than plowing. In my first few hours here I haven't seen a single plow. What I have seen are hundreds of exhibitions and there are at least as many I haven't seen.

The Ploughing Championships are a big deal, but what I was curious about is whether they're a tourist attraction. I think the answer is definitely 'No.' One of the first exhibitor tents I found was one labeled International Visitors Pavilion. When I saw the sign as I was walking along, I had visions of meeting dozens of visitors from Britain, America, Germany, wherever, maybe with free coffee and cake for 'us.' Unfortunately it was not so.

The International Visitors Pavilion was nothing more than a table with brochures from Fáilte Ireland, the national tourism agency. A very pleasant woman there was almost apologetic when I asked her about the the exhibit's name, but she also told me that as far as she could tell there were only Irish people at the Ploughing Championships, other than some exhibitors from England. All the visitors to her tent yesterday and so far today had been Irish people, interested in an Irish vacation or short break. Oh well.

There is one other exhibitor I want to mention now. (I'll have more later.) Kingswood Computing are selling software to farmers. I had a chat with two gentlemen selling the software because I was curious as to whether Irish farmers were had really gone high tech. The answer is that those who have, really have, but a large percentage won't touch a computer. As one of them told me, show them a modern tractor with GPS and they're all there, but try to interest them in a piece of software and, well, you can pretty much forget about it.

However, it's not like Irish farmers wouldn't benefit from computers. As I learned, the records that farmers must now keep to ensure total traceability of their products are very, very detailed. They showed me the record for one cow and every cough, chill or calf is recorded so that we consumers can have total confidence in our food. This traceability allows the supermarkets to even put the farmer's face on the packaging of their beef, which is something I'm pretty sure is not available in American supermarkets.

All of which reminded me of something I saw when I was in a supermarket near Albany, NY last month. The beef was labeled as being the product of US, Canada & Mexico. (And, yes they used the '&' sign so it's AND and not OR.}

Sure, it's "grain-fed for rich beef flavor," but where the heck did it come from? Even those Irish farmers who don't use computers to keep their records must keep the detailed records and anyone selling beef will be able to tell you all about the farm and animal itself. It's reassuring, actually.

More later - and keep an eye on the twitter posts too (above right).

The Ploughing Championships are really a big trade show

Posted by TheYank at 9/23/2009 9:23 AM EDT

They may call the event the National Ploughing Championships, but the trade show is really the center of attention. It's literally at the center of everything that goes on here. The plowing is - for me anyway - hard to find and on the outskirts of all that's happening. Having said that, the trade show is not without its merits as an attraction for this desk-bound, urban/suburban guy.

Two exhibitors in particular caught my eye this morning. One is selling log homes and the other is selling cosmetic products. Yup cosmetics, which tells you more about the people who come to the Ploughing Championships: they're not all farmers as you'd imagine them. There are a lot of women here and an equal share of the exhibits are targeted at women.


The exhibitors that caught my eye included:
Óg Ireland - making cosmetics out of Irish peat taken out of a bog in Offaly. The face mask product - looks like a tub of dark brown mud - is 100% peat and (according to John Kenny of Og Ireland) can help with acne, psoriasis and other serious skin issues.
JPK Log Homes - three men from this company explained to me how houses hand built of pine or cedar in Pennsylvania - with Amish labor, if I'm remembering correctly - are then shipped to Ireland and put together here. Sounded almost too fantastic to me. I couldn't get my head around the idea that shipping a house across an ocean could pay. They assured me it does. {They need to get that web site right.}
The Arch diocese of Dublin - both Catholic and Church of Ireland (Anglican) sharing a tent in a bid to woo the farmers back to church? Have the farmers also left? I didn't realize that.
The agricultural machinery distributor selling a 'cow wash' that looks like a small version of a car wash with the big rollers that scrub the cow top, sides and rump. I only wish it was in operation rather than sitting idle while a video showed how it worked.
For some reason I liked a lot of the agricultural equipment on display. Tractors, milking machines, silos, etc. Just so different from the usual broadband services and computer software type trade shows that I've attended frequently in the past.


John, James & Jimmy of JPK Log Homes. They showed me pictures of their American log houses and other buildings across the country.

Some people like air shows ... I don't

Posted by TheYank at 7/29/2009 4:13 PM EDT

On Sunday I went to the Air Show in Bray, Co. Wicklow. The papers say that there were 50,000 people there, but from my vantage point the crowd looked pretty sparse. I watched the air show from on top of Bray head, where, I had a good view of the people standing on the 'beach' below ... and the planes above (sort of) ... and the dark, gray clouds that seemed to be everywhere.

Maybe it was the weather - cool, very windy, gray - but I didn't really enjoy the show. In fact, I would certainly have given it a miss, if not for my eight-year-old son's insistence. So we made the trip to the top of the hill and watched as planes did their thing. And, I didn't really mind the planes, but I could have lived without the helicopters, all of which seemed to do the same thing and all well below where we were.


Having picked our way past a few dozen blue children - did I mention that if Al Roker had been on Bray Head he'd have been talking about wind chill - we were fortunate to find a couple of uncomfortable rocks to sit on, on the slightly-less-windy sea-side of the hill. And there we stayed for two and a bit hours watching planes and helicopters and helicopters and planes. Once or twice there multiple planes, but mostly it was one plane or one helicopter at a time.

Within 20 minutes I was pretty bored and by the end of the first hour I was ready for sleep (although I understand that hypothermia can do that to you). Just couldn't work up any enthusiasm for the flying display whatsoever.

Did I mention that this was my third year at the Bray Air Show? Yup, three times there, each time because the same small boy insisted.


At least I had the foresight to bring a book this year, which I would have read if that aforementioned small boy had not insisted on having my full attention every time there was a lull in the proceedings. The book was a very good idea, but, in the end, all it was was extra weight in the the bag on my back for both our ascent and descent.

Did I mention the mud? Some other time maybe.