Hay bales as bowls, oil drums as pins, and tractors as athletes — the inaugural AgQuip Tractor Games blended agriculture and sport in true trans-Tasman style
It’s the soft, low thud of a hay bale colliding with the dignity of a sporting tradition. It is the sound of agriculture meeting athletics in a four-wheeled ballet, a rural fever dream involving lawn bowls, ten pin bowling, and AFL ‘kickin goals’, all played with hay bales, delivered with the grace of the humble tractor fork.
The concept is simple – which is to say, only someone with adult ADHD and the sort of issues that make psychologists need counselling could possibly have come up with, let alone understand the rules.
Imagine, if you will, a field resplendent with freshly mown grass (well on day one anyway, before it turned to a muddy battlefield), a line-up of tractors that look as if they’ve just escaped from a machinery lot, and a crowd of spectators watching in awe of the sudden sprints from rogue rolling bales.
Making its debut at the AqQuip Field Days in Australia, the event was months in the planning and proved an instant crowd pleaser (if only for the opportunity to reinvigorate that epic trans-Tasman rivalry).
Let’s begin with the lawn bowls. Except, replace the bowls with triple wrapped hay bales, and the bowler is a tractor. The aim: gently roll your bale closest to the jack, in a game of touch and finesse to decide the winner (or in the case of fellow competitor Harrison Hukin for team Australia, a total lack of spatial awareness, with his bale last seen heading towards Gunnedah).
Ten pin bowling was equally competitive. The traditional pins were replaced with carefully arranged 44-gallon oil drums. Points were awarded for accuracy and bravery. Actually, no, I lie, points were mainly awarded depending on how the judges felt the scoreboard looked – with points being allocated to my two competitors for simply being Australian! Pretty typical stuff when it comes to trans-Tasman scoring.
It was the AFL kicking challenge that brought the crowd to its feet – or at least, to a state of mild vertigo. There is something exquisitely Australian about trying to score a goal by flicking a round bale off your tractor tines, aiming between two hastily erected posts, from empty Adblue IBCs – again a complex algorithm in scoring which scoring for myself included deductions of up to 70% as a ‘Kiwi tax’.
The three-day AqQuip Field Days saw a total of nine Tractor Games take place – a constant and revolving showcase of rural ingenuity, mechanical prowess, wild and unhinged cheating from the Aussies (no surprises there) and a sense of humour from MC Ashley Walmsley, a Queensland native with wit even drier than the Australian desert.
The inaugural AgQuip Tractor Games achieved the impossible, transforming agricultural workhorses into sporting heroes, and leaving a generation of children convinced that the Olympics are missing out on something big.
Next year promises even more. My head is swirling with fresh craziness – sheepdog curling and combine harvester synchronised swimming are on the cards. In the meantime, AgQuip will sweep up the hay, patch up the fences, and wait for the bales to roll again.