Day job: “I work with local agricultural contractor Lyons Contracts. I am doing mostly drilling at the minute for winter crops. We do a lot of silage work too and cut up to 15,000 acres of grass in a year.”

Weather: “Conditions are perfect for drilling right now. Weather has been wet over the past few weeks, but it is mainly good this week with the odd shower. It is a huge difference compared with this time last year.”

World champion: “I won the reversible class at the World Ploughing Championships near Stuttgart in Germany at the beginning of September. It’s been coming, I’ve been runner-up in the reversible class four times before.”

Screggan: “I didn’t get to the National Ploughing Championships in Screggan last week. I would usually be down judging at it, but I was only back from Germany a week and I had things to sort out at home.”

Cost: “You have to take your own toys if you want to compete; every plough is different. It cost £2,500 to get my plough and tractor out to Germany. We pay the majority of it ourselves, but some help comes from money made from our own championship. We also cut costs by sharing lorries with competitors from other countries.”

Title defence: “The Northern Ireland championships are on this weekend in Eglinton. Friday is the qualifier and Saturday is the final. I will have to try and defend my title. If you win it then you qualify for the world championships which are in Minnesota in the US next year.”

Quotable quote: “I won the conventional class at the world championships in Austria in 1997. After I added to it with the reversible class gold medal this year, somebody told me that I should start ploughing with horses.”

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All-Ireland domination at World Ploughing

Watch: competition horse ploughing