This is the Guardian.

Hi, my name is Sophie Elmhurst.

I'm the author of Field of Dreams, heartbreak and heroics at the world-playing championships.

I guess the first thing to say is I'm acutely aware looking back that competitive

plowing is not an obvious subject for a 5,000-word longweed. And I'm still grateful to my

editor for letting me write this at all. In my memory, a fair amount of convincing had to go

on to persuade him it really was an essential subject to cover. The idea came my way in the

typically scientific process of chancing upon something on the internet. In this case,

I happened to read about the existence of plowing matches and I wondered what they were.

By the time I found out that there was in fact a world-plowing championship that took place

every year and was hotly contested by competitors from all over the world, I was really desperate to go.

Even more so when I went to meet the English competitors, the Indomitable Mick Chappell and Ashley

Boyles who feature in this piece, both committed devoted plowman. On a met them, I realized that one

of my favourite things in journalism is finding and writing about people who are possessed by an

unlikely obsession. Underdogs especially. I also loved immediately the idea of writing about a sport

that most people don't even know as a sport that has no money in it, no audience. It's kept alive

by plowman and some plow women who are just deeply enamored by plowing. Most of them, wherever they

are in the world grew up on farms and many still farm for a living. And it was this aspect that drew

me into when you drive out of a city or you see a field, the work of farming and yet many of us are

almost entirely disconnected from this work even though we eat it's produce every day.

And I suppose that's what researching this piece really revealed to me too that due to the

climate crisis farming was going through a kind of internal upheaval. There was plowing this

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