NUFFIELD Farming scholarships are 50 years old this year and among the celebrations was a gathering in London last month of half a dozen prominent scholars whose farming careers had been shaped irretrievably by the award. The parade of the great and the good at the Farmers' Club in London included Welsh sheep farmer Alun Evans, dairy farmer Ben Boot from Shropshire, hop farmer John Cyster from Sussex and recently-retired egg farmer Alan Beckett from Warwickshire. He told how he had sailed on the Queen Mary in 1958, when it was cheaper to go by boat than fly, to study dairy cow and labour management in the USA. As soon he was back in Warwickshire he persuaded the family to sell the cows and invest the money in intensfve egg production.
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