For the past 60 years the Nuffield Farming Scholarship Trust has awarded travel scholarships to young people in farming and rural industries to enable them to visit other countries to expand their knowledge and encourage them to be innovative.
Noted livestock breeder Neil McGowan, of Incheoch, Alyth, has just been awarded a Nuffield Scholarship sponsored by the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society.
Here he tells David Andrews about his plans.
Q What is the aim of your scholarship?
A I am going to study the management of large-scale seed stock breeding programmes for sheep and cattle.
Q Where will you study this?
A I want to go to New Zealand to see how they practically manage performance-recorded flocks, which can sometimes extend to 20,000 ewes.
I want to see how this is done, what they are recording and how they verify the figures, as well as how they market the sheep.
That is the sheep side of the scholarship.
On cattle, I will be visiting Australia, Canada and the United States to look at how they are breeding with bigger numbers, particularly with regard to feed efficiency.
Q Do you think those countries are ahead of the UK in this type of work?
A I think we have world-class stock in this country, particularly in terms of carcase and growth traits, but feed efficiency is one area where we have not done a great deal of work.
In comparison there has been work going on in Australia for decades now.
More recently, they seem to be getting places in the USA.
I think in this country we maybe need to have a look at ourselves and what we are doing in the bull market.
We now have cattle that grow very fast to big weights. Maybe we do not need to make them any bigger. Maybe we need to concentrate on getting them finished more cheaply.
In the States and in Australia they are finding there can be a big variation in feed efficiency in cattle, even the same type of cattle.
I think the line that saw me being awarded the scholarship was when I spoke about a bull in California that was sold this autumn.
Basically, as you know, chickens convert food at a ratio of two units of food to one unit of growth; pigs at three to one but cattle are at 10 to one.
This Angus bull was in a batch which was converting food at six to one.
Within that batch there was quite a variation, and this particular bull had been converting food at a ratio of three to one. In other words, he had achieved the same weight gain but he had done it on half the feed.
If we can find animals with those genes in this country I think it could transform the industry.
Q How does the scholarship award work?
A The way it works is that 22 people were awarded scholarships at the Nuffield annual conference in November, and we have to report back to their meeting in November 2016.
Q Are there other Scottish farmers in this year’s list of scholars?
A Scotland is well represented this year with four scholars.
Apart from myself, there is Gordon Whiteford, who is an egg producer in Morayshire; Robert Fleming from Stranraer, who is looking at beef production; and the first Nuffield scholar from Orkney is Steven Sandison.
He was a Monitor farmer and his subject will be bench marking in suckler cows.
Q When do you make your first steps on this study tour?
A We have 10 days of training where we meet all the other UK scholars as well as those from overseas, including quite a few from Australia New Zealand, Canada and France.
There is also a new international award this year, and this went to a scholar from Brazil.
We all meet up in Reims in northern France at the beginning of March.
Q All this travelling around the world must leave a gap at home.
You are very much a hands-on farmer. How do you get around this problem?
A That is probably going to be the biggest challenge for me about the whole award.
One of the stipulations that the Nuffield Farming Trust insist on is that eight weeks are spent away from home, including a block of a four-week period.
Q That is quite a lot for a livestock farmer such as yourself, is it not?
A It is to prove you can take a step back and get away from your business.
I spoke to my late great uncle Andrew Biggar about this aspect of the award.
He was very encouraging as he believed in the saying that if you find yourself indispensable to your business then you do not have a business you have a job, and not only that but you worked for a lunatic.
I find myself very fortunate in that we have a very good team at Incheoch.
There are two full-time workers, Jim Smith and Murdo Culbertson, who are very good.
My father Finlay is still very active, and my wife Debbie is more than capable of dealing with any issues that come along.
Q Describe your home farming enterprise.
A At Incheoch we run 1,100 ewes and 220 cows on 1,200 acres.
The ewes are mainly Lleyns with a few Texels.
All the stock are pedigree performance recorded.
Q You have always been a strong supporter of Lleyns.
A The Lleyns were Debbie’s and her flock of 60 came to Incheoch when we got married.
The 1,000 ewes that are here now, and many more which have started up other flocks, have all come from those 60
And it doesn’t seem as if we’ve been married all that long!
I travelled after I left college and came home with the idea to develop a composite breed.
I did that for 10 years, but then I had to admit the pure Lleyn ewes were better than my composite breed and had more to offer as a commercial ewe.
At home the commercial Lleyn ewes are run with a Texel tup, and that suits us on this type of farm: a small ewe to see through the winter, a canny mother to lamb outside in May with plenty lambs, and a growthy lamb to be away before grass disappears.
Q You have built up a strong reputation for your pedigree tups, which you sell on farm at the Working Genes sale.
A From my previous travels I stole a lot of ideas from New Zealand and Australia.
A lot of those came together in our breeding programme.
From that programme people became interested in our rams, and that was how we started the on-farm ram sale seven years ago.
I hope this scholarship will help us drive this breeding programme forward.
In other words, I want to go and steal some more ideas.
Q In your cattle enterprise you are working with two breeds, Luings and Simmentals. Tell us about them.
A The Luings are pure bred but are very much aimed at the commercial world.
They help produce Sim/Luing breeding heifers.
In total we sell about 20 bulls per year, mostly Simmentals.
Q Your family have been strong supporters of those breeds for a long time.
A Dad had Simmentals right from the early importations, and we have had a fair amount of success with the breed at Perth Bull Sales and more recently at Stirling.
The Dirnanean Luing herd was purchased along with the Perthshire hill farm in 1976 by my parents.