HCPM25: Dodds family to host match for first time, despite decades of involvement
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
It’s been about 175 years since the Dodds family first started farming in this area, which means it’s time for the family to finally host the Huron County Plowing Match (HCPM). As the big event is drawing near, The Citizen stopped in for a visit with hosts Paul and Kathy Dodds at their Seaforth-area farm to hear all about how preparations are coming along.
A few things have fallen into place to make this the right year for the Dodds to host. “In the past, we never really had the right facility,” Paul explained. “We just put up the new shed last year, and there just happened to be a 50-acre wheat field right around it this year - so it just kind of fit!”
Once he had the right facility and the right field crop in place, Paul also thought he should seek Kathy’s approval before inviting hundreds of visitors to descend onto the family farm. “He asked, and I said yes!” Kathy recalled with excitement. While the Dodds surname may be synonymous with farming in Huron County, there’s more than a few people from St. Clements that feel the same way about Kathy’s maiden name: Lorentz.
Kathy may have grown up riding a tractor, but she didn’t have her first experience with a big plowing match until the 2017 International Plowing Match in Walton, not too long after she met Paul. She immediately fell in love with the unique sense of community generated by a plowing match. She also feels that the HCPM is a great opportunity for newcomers like her to learn a little about the farming arts. “As a person just coming into this, I think some people who have heard of a plowing match maybe don’t know what it is, so this will be good for them; to observe how they plow, and watch the competition, and see the actual measurements, and all the thinking that goes into plowing,” she pointed out, “as well as the fun of being able to mingle with neighbours and people they maybe haven’t seen in a long time; just the community kind of coming together all in one little area and enjoying a good beef dinner.”
They’re not sure how many people to expect, but the Dodds are thinking it’ll be somewhere around 300 guests for the Friday night banquet, and they’re hoping for at least 50 plowing participants to come out for the competition. Just to be on the safe side, Paul is mentally preparing himself for more. “We could see 500, 600 people come and go,” he mused. “Weather-dependent, of course.”
While it may be a higher volume of responsibility for the pair, Paul remains undaunted. “We’ve been involved with things, but never actually hosted that kind of numbers,” he explained. “We’re working away yet.” Kathy is just as confident everything will come together. “It’ll be fine! Totally fine… and it’s only two days!”
They can’t help but feel confident - after all, they’ve got the strong support of the Huron County Plowmen’s Association (HCPA). “The Huron County Plowmen is such a great committee. It’s like a well-oiled machine - they just plug it in, and it’s like, ‘okay, so this is where we’re going, and this is what we’re doing,” Kathy explained. Paul couldn’t agree more. “Everybody’s got their duties that they do - we just leave it up to them, and they get it done.”
Despite Kathy’s enthusiasm for Huron County’s annual salute to the agricultural arts, she currently has no ambitions to follow in the footsteps of HCPA President Steve Hallahan. “I’ll just judge for the Princess competition - that’s as far as I’m going to go,” she declared. “And host this.”
She’s especially looking forward to the Princess and Queen competitions. “To compete in public speaking - that’s not a thing anymore,” Kathy explained. “For these young ladies to want to be the face of the plowing match, and be the Queen or the Princess and get involved that way at a young age, I think that’s actually inspiring.”
In terms of the preparation work they’re doing around the farm, it’s pretty much business as usual, with a little additional emphasis on yard beautification. “Everything’s falling into place,” Kathy told The Citizen. Paul rightly pointed out that a brand new shed is a whole lot easier to clean than an old one. “There was no better time,” he said.
Even though the three Dodds family dogs are generally considered to be a pretty mellow bunch, they’ll be heading off to a kennel for the duration of the festivities, on the off-chance that the sudden influx of strangers could be overstimulating for them.
Paul has been to more than a few plowing matches on a lot of host farms in many different places, and he’s incorporating some of the elements he most appreciated from those experiences into his plowing match hosting plan. “I read ideas from different areas, and think about the things we’re trying to get together, and about the layout - where things are going to go, and how things are going to work,” he explained.
Before becoming a HCPM host, Paul represented Canada at the International Plowing Championship in France - the Olympics of the plowing world. “It was kind of special to be able to get there and be a Canadian representative and have the country's name on your back. It was good. A real, great honour,” Paul recalled. “The plowing match has given me the opportunity to meet people from one end of the country to the other, and in different countries around the world. And it’s nice to have Facebook friends from all over the world because of plowing - you kind of keep an eye on what they’re doing, and what’s going on in other parts of the world.”
Paul feels that looking back at the history of farming can deepen people’s appreciation of what we all have today. “Look at what the past generations had to do just to survive versus today - everything was highly manual labour in the past, and there is so much mechanization now, to the point of the computerization of everything. I think if you tried to tell your great-grandfather what would have been coming, they’d have told you you were absolutely crazy,” he pointed out. “Even what Dad has seen in his 80-plus years of being on the farm - it’s been huge. The change from horses, to the original tractor, to the size of equipment now, and the scope of what one person can do on a farm.”
Although Paul appreciates modern technology, he doesn’t believe that automatic, driverless, field plowing robots should be allowed to compete in plowing matches. “It takes the competitive human aspect out of it,” he asserted. “And that’s what plowing matches were set up to be, 100-plus years ago. Guys just heading out with their horses to see who could do the nicest job plowing… you wouldn’t have robots playing hockey in the NHL.”
As for his advice to aspiring plowing champions: become one with your equipment. “You can feel and anticipate what’s going to happen before it does… almost. It’s not being trained to react after the fact, but react beforehand, to make sure that it comes up right,” he explained. “You get presented obstacles in every plot of land that you get to plow - you never know what you’re heading for when you go to the fields.”
His advice for those who aren’t involved with agriculture to any extent? Come out to the HCPM! “They’ll be able to see what goes on with cash crop type farming - they’re not going to get the total view of everything, but they can see what it is,” he told The Citizen. “And just come out, and see what’s going on in the community.”