Most operators will agree you can spend an obsessive amount of time setting a plough and making endless adjustments.

And it’s a real experience to see the humble plough in the hands of the competition masters. But with the pressure to get crops in, a quick grease and a check to see the front furrow matches up is often all the reversible plough gets before it’s used in anger.

And yet this is a sophisticated tool which has literally thousands of years of development and refinement in its pedigree.

Farmers Weekly took a quick refresher course with specialists Mike Huntington and Jason Weston from Knight Rabe farm machinery. The plough we were using was a Rabe Super Albatros, marketed in the UK as the Raven. It’s a fully mounted plough and the model we used was a five-furrow plough with slatted mouldboards. Pulling it was a Claas Arion 640 160hp six-cylinder tractor.

Our thanks to Knight Rabe Farm Machinery, Kemble Farms Ltd, The Royal Agricultural College Rural Skills Centre.