When Mr Chappell left school at 16, in 1951, he joined his father and his uncle doing contracting work. His grandparents had farmed about 100 rented acres before the war – beef, arable and poultry – and their sons carried on farming through contracting.

He learned to plough and plant and cut and stack corn in "stooks", which leaned against each other while they dried, until it was time to build them into stacks – a manual labour which was made uneconomic by the combine harvester and still would be, however much we might regret it.

By corn, an old farmer means wheat, barley and oats – still the basic cereal crops of Britain, although oats have given ground to barley, which used to be thought a bit rich for animal feed.

When the combines first came in, the thrashed corn still had to be manually stuffed into huge sacks from the railway company.

Once filled, the sacks would weigh 16 stone or more. Any man worth his salt was expected to get one onto a lorry single-handed.

In 1956, his father bought the family farm, at Hemsworth, near Pontefract, and Mr Chappell worked for him until 1964, when his younger brother took his place and he rented a farm of his own, from what was then the West
Riding County Council.

At the time, there were quite a lot of small council holdings to let, to encourage people into farming.

It worked for Ken Chappell. He has made a living off the land up to the age of nearly 74, and he has two sons and a brother still following his example.

He eventually bought the farm he first rented – Quarry Farm at Loversall, near Doncaster.

It has never been all that big – 120 acres at one point, now down to 50.

But it is an address known all over the world, as the headquarters of the Society of Ploughmen, which Mr Chappell runs with his daughter, Susan Frith.

He used to grow beet, potatoes, wheat and barley there and on another holding, east of Doncaster, which his brother started building up when it was his turn to leave home. They also did some contracting together.

Now Mr Chappell is semi-retired, but his sons kept on 50 acres of Quarry Farm and they farm that as well as doing contract work for other farmers.

He organises ploughing courses on land rented from Lindholme Prison – which no longer wants to put prisoners to work on it – and they sow the land afterwards. Last year, on one plot, they were too late for most things and tried millet, for the bird-seed business. It went well enough that they are having another go this year.

Potatoes got to be quite a big business for the Chappells for a while but they have pulled out because of poor prices. They are still growing rape and beans.

It is clay land and the contractor put the clay aside and rolled it out to be puddled, the old-fashioned way.

Now 350 trees and 2,500 bushes have been planted and ponds stocked with carp, ide and tench. It will all take time to mature but the first anglers are already turning up, happy to get a day's fishing for £5.

Mr Chappell entered his first ploughing competition at the age of 12 and won. In 1971, the British Ploughing Association organised the World Ploughing Contest and foundered afterwards.

Mr Chappell drove his father to a meeting in Stafford, to discuss setting up a new organisation.

He was reading a newspaper when the committee came out to say he and his brother had been volunteered as joint secretaries, in time for the 1973 British Championships.

When we meet, he is fresh off the phone from talking to an American who wants to come over for ploughing lessons – or fly him out to North
Carolina. It's not just a matter of keeping a straight line. The depth of the furrow must be just right for the crop. The ridges have to fit together perfectly, like bars of Toblerone in a dish, so all the surface weeds are sealed inside to die.

The ploughs have to be lifted at the right time at the end of one run and lowered just so at the start of the next. And everything has to be weighed down and angled to suit the soil and the weather.

A good ploughman, it becomes clear, is a mechanic as much as a driver. The British and the Irish produce most of the world champions, although Austria is a respected foe.

There was a fashion for no-plough farming for a bit, but it is not as productive, and ploughing is making a comeback.

The 2008 National Ploughing Championships – the 58th – will be held at Marden, near Tonbridge, Kent, next weekend – October 11 and October 12 – to find two champions to go to the next World Contest in Slovenia in 2009. In a good year, 15,000 people turn up to watch competitions including horses, vintage tractors and ploughs going back 100 years. The latest computer-driven machines, which can plough a prairie using sat-nav and sonar, are not allowed.The manufacturers will be there, however, looking for the kind of lonely ploughman who can nowadays afford a couple of hundred grand.

More from www.ploughmen.co.uk or 01302 842469.