When Country Living asks Anna Marie McHugh what her position as general secretary of the World Ploughing Organisation (WPO) entails, she retorts: “I thought this interview was going to be quick.”

Appointed to the position 18 months ago, in essence Anna Marie puts the Ploughing Championships together. Her role is strictly concerned with organising the Ploughing itself, as opposed to the exhibitions.

“When you go to the world contest your duty is to hold a successful event,” explains Anna Marie. “For them, the exhibition side of it is something that could interfere. It’s just about the ploughing.”

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There are 33 affiliate countries, 31 of which are participating, and Anna Marie is the link between the host country and the 33 affiliates.

Her work involves everything from collating the results and organising the scrutineers, to managing entry forms, calling meetings, accepting motions for challenges and doing the paperwork for the practice and competition plots.

“The admin is huge,” she says. “At the worlds, everything has to be right and they’re very quick to tell you if you aren’t doing it right. There’s so much on the line, but I’ve proved myself in the past 12 months.”

Anna Marie is the first female secretary in the male-dominated WPO.

“There’d be 300 to 400 officials at the World Ploughing and out of that three to four would be women,” she remarks.

Much of Anna Marie’s time is spent on Skype with her executive committee. The committee members are from New Zealand, Norway, Germany, Canada, Croatia and Denmark, so the language barrier is challenging.

“We talk slowly,” says Anna Marie, “and at board meetings some of the boarders bring interpreters.”

To say Anna Marie is extremely busy is an understatement.

“I left here on Wednesday 27 August [for the World Ploughing Championships] and I do not exaggerate, I moved into a beautiful hotel in Bordeaux, and between then and 8 September I didn’t have five minutes of my own time.”

In the latter stages of the event, Anna Marie was getting up at 5.30am and going to bed at 1.30am. But she had help from two ladies that came with her voluntarily, Róisín Deery and Ann O’Shea.

The position brings Anna Marie abroad quite a lot, and Kenya is just one country she’ll be in at least twice before the World Ploughing takes place there in 2017.

Of course, such a schedule isn’t very conducive to family life.

“I have a boy named Saran Buttle. I’d be gone for a fortnight and he’d say: ‘Mammy you’re not going off again’. For a week beforehand, if he looked at me I’d be in tears. He’s a ploughing addict. I couldn’t tell him it was ploughing I was going to in France because he’d want to come – ploughing is his life.”

How does she cope with stress?

“It’s a real love/hate. I say to myself: ‘I was in a full-time job, more than a full-time job, before this. I didn’t need another challenge’. And it’s not a worthwhile thing to do financially. But we had to ask ourselves, did we want to pass the opportunity of having the headquarters in Ireland?”

They didn’t, and that’s why the headquarters of the World Ploughing Organisation found a home in Ireland and the NPA. The backup team in the office, where the NPA employs four full-time staff (and six full-time temps from May until the end of September), are a fantastic support to Anna Marie, but she also strongly credits her family, including her husband Declan Buttle.

It’s passion as much as people that keep her going.

“It’s nearly like a drug in a way. It’s an addiction of some sort. And there’s the other side of it too. The birth of your children goes down as the most amazing thing that ever happens to you. But in the two years I’ve been secretary, I’ve called out an Irish man as world champion: ‘Eamon Treacy, Republic of Ireland’. That was also tremendous for me. That’s the stuff you remember on your deathbed.”