Many hands make a great match: Bruce County comes together to pull of the IPM
By Mel Luymes
It is early August. The wheat is harvested and the cover crop has been drilled across the site of the International Plowing Match (IPM), running September 22-26, just west of Walkerton.
The hydro lines are going up, and today a few volunteers will be marking out the dimensions of the RV park with a GPS rover rod, orange paint, stakes and sledgehammers. Trucks and side-by-sides criss-cross the site in a flurry of activity.
Gord Lang, chair of the IPM local committee, takes some time away from the hubbub to tour the Rural Voice around the site. His black truck is hard to miss, emblazoned with the Bruce County IPM logo and sponsored by Hallman Motors. Owner Shawn Turner is also on the organizing committee and is helping bring a pop-up Auto Mall to the show.
At the Riley farm, Gord jumps out to meet with the Wilhelm brothers – Boo, Willie and Smoker – who have arrived to mark out the RV park. They are all smiles and banter, getting ready for some hard work on a scorching day. They are soon joined by committee chairs Bill Clancy and Mark Schnurr, along with Travis Burnside from Cobide Engineering. They go over some modifications to the IPM site layout before heading out to mark it in the fields.
For now, the site is a rolling expanse of wheat stubble, but in a month, it will be transformed into a buzzing temporary city hosting more than 10,000 people a day. There are two acres of standing corn near Bruce County Road 3.
“That is a corn maze for the kids,” says Gord. He finds a photo of the maze on his phone – it is in the shape of Big Bruce, a Hereford bull statue that stands outside Arran–Elderslie municipal office in Chesley.
Visitors will also find a tented city of vendors, a campground, a rodeo, square-dancing tractors (see the Team Farmall story on page 25), the Queen of the Furrow competition, concerts, a beer garden, a variety of food trucks and – of course! – daily plowing competitions (see the story on Tom Evans on page 17). There will also be plenty for children to learn and do, with school groups bussed in each day.
The total footprint of the site is 1,100 acres, with a handful of neighbouring landowners providing contiguous fields for the event. There will be roughly 650 RV sites, with additional space for up to 1,300 sites, and 8,000 parking spots on the main site, with Gord’s own field – across the road from Huron Tractor – available for overflow parking.
“This will actually be the third time the IPM is hosted here,” explains Gord.
Most of the site is now owned by Lang Farms. But 50 years ago, for the 1976 IPM and again in 1993, the area was largely owned by members of the Johnson family.
Tony Lang is Gord’s second cousin, and the Lang family’s roots in the area go back to German immigrants who arrived in the 1850s. Lang Farms – now owned by Tony, his son Joe, and Andy Dales – bought most of these farms from the Johnsons in the late 1990s.
“Tony has just been one of the greatest guys for our area, just an incredible man,” says Gord, noting the substantial donations Tony has made to the community over the years.
Lang Farms Ltd. is headquartered northwest of Walkerton, near Chepstow, growing grains and oilseeds, operating a grain elevator and serving as an independent seed retailer.
Gord has his own history with the match. He remembers his father competing in the 1976 IPM with a walking plow behind a horse.
This year, the plowing competitions will be held on the south side of the IPM site, on another Lang Farms field on Highway 9. Barry Ribey is managing the plowing components of the match, with five subcommittees under him.
Gord chairs a steering committee of five people: Jarius Maus, Willie Dales, Andy Dales, Bill Walker and Bill Clancy. Together, they oversee nine committees encompassing more than 60 subcommittees.
It is a well-oiled machine, looking after every moving part of this ambitious event. There are chairpeople covering everything from accommodations (Andrew Windsor) and the cookbook (Lauren Maus) to the Queen of the Furrow competition (Miranda Klaver), parades (Cindy Ditner), parking (Ray and Doug Wright), sanitation (Travis and Ashley Inglis) and so much more.
In total, some 1,300 people will be volunteering for September’s event.
While things are ramping up now that the wheat is off, much of the planning began two and a half years ago.
The Bruce County Plowmen’s Association expressed interest in hosting the event in 2026 – 50 years after it first hosted the IPM – after securing the same site with local landowners. Once the location was confirmed, a meeting was held to begin pulling together the organizational structure.
Gord’s wife, Lee-Ann, encouraged him to attend, especially considering the event would be held on neighbouring farmland.
“I wanted to be sure I’d get a good parking spot,” Gord jokes.
At the meeting, people were given a draft organizational chart and invited to volunteer themselves – or others – for various positions. Gord says he hummed and hawed about where he might want to be involved.
Afterwards, three separate people asked if he would consider the chair position, including Bob Hammell (1953-2025), a former chair of the Ontario Plowmen’s Association (OPA). The OPA works alongside the local committee to run the IPM each year.
Gord went home and discussed it with Lee-Ann. Having recently retired from his busy construction business, he was looking for a way to contribute the rest of his time. After decades of leading building projects and teams of contractors, he certainly had the skills to manage people.
For Gord, though, leading means listening. It is not about micromanaging or telling people what they should be doing. With an event this complex, there is no choice but to trust the people leading each part, he says, and support them as needed.
“Everyone working on this IPM is incredible,” he says. “They remind me of how not smart I am. This event is all because of them.”
These days, the committee meets every two weeks and soon will meet every week.
Gord is also immensely grateful to the local sponsors helping make the event possible. Platinum sponsors include Ontario Power Generation, WM, Bruce Power, Britespan, CarePartners, Ontario Mutuals and Teeswater Concrete. Gold sponsors include Kinectrics, Westinghouse, Equipment Ontario, Candu, Robert’s Equipment, Midwest Co-op, Foxton Fuels and Huron Tractor.
As well, in July, the province of Ontario invested $125,000 through the 2026 Experience Ontario program to support the Ontario Plowmen’s Association and the local Bruce County committee.
The event itself is estimated to cost $1.5 million, Gord explains, and he figures they will need at least three days of strong attendance to break even. Any profit generated by the IPM will be donated back to local charities and initiatives, he says.
Now that setup is in full gear, organizers are also ramping up efforts to get people through the gates.
For Gord and the organizing committee, the IPM is a chance to celebrate Bruce County agriculture and rural life while bringing tens of thousands of visitors – and tourism dollars – to the area.
But before any of that can happen, there are still countless details to get right.
The 2026 International Plowing Match & Rural Expo will be held at 95 Durham Rd., Walkerton, from Tuesday, September 22 to Saturday, September 26, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. Advance tickets are $20 until September 8; after that, regular admission is $25. Admission for youth under 16 is $5, while children under five are free. More information is available at www.plowingmatch.org/ipm2026.
We hope to see you at the IPM in September – and let’s all hope for some excellent weather! ◊