Fieldays

What a wonderful evocative word! Every year in June, Mystery Creek (another great name) hosts, on average around 30,000 visitors, over a period of four days, to view the Southern Hemisphere’s largest display of agricultural products.

Everything is to scale; the massive computerised John Deere tractor costs more than a small neighbourhood to buy. Contrast that, with three for a dollar, finger puppets.

So Saturday is deemed ‘Townie’s day’. They arrive, as a generalisation; over dressed folk carrying lengths of plastic cow prods with over indulged toddlers astride cute designer plywood bikes peruse the stands with overzealous enthusiasm. Mum has bought the ‘styley’ de rigueur gumboots with pretty little flowers all over them.

Real farmers wear thick soled sneakers (they paved the main roads, a few years ago, so plodding through mud all day, has long gone) and buy their gumboots from the Skellerup tent and thick socks from the Swandri tent.

Around lunchtime, it is the tractor pull competition time and townies and country folk alike, congregate to watch the big machines race up and down muddy paddock, against the clock. I think it is the noise that really attracts the attention. Nothing is quite like watching the grunty V engines, revving up – “stirs the old blood, I’d say”.

photos from http://www.fieldays.co.nz/