50 YEARS OF THE RARE BREEDS SURVIVAL TRUST
A view from the farm
A load of odd-bods.” Those aren’t my words but a memorable phrase from my old friend and fellow farmer, Charles Martell. What’s more, he’s fully qualified to say it because he was one of those ‘odd-bods’ waving the conservation flag in the 1970s.
It’s hard for us to imagine today, but in the post-war years, no one had heard of sustainability or biodiversity and public campaigns were mostly focussed on the blue whale and giant pandas. At the same time, agriculture was being intensified and highly productive modern livestock were introduced to meet the demands of a hungry population.
So it’s no wonder that when a small band of enthusiasts stepped forward to save Britain’s historic farm breeds, they were greeted with deafening indifference. Traditional native breeds, such as Lincoln Longwool sheep and South Devon cattle, were considered the ‘old timers of the farmyard’. My dad would often talk about the time he took his Old Spot pigs to auction and was laughed out of the market.
But by 1973, things were changing and Charles remembers the first meeting of rare-breeds farmers “in a greenhouse in Portsmouth”, which marked the birth of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust. “Suddenly you could feel the confidence that we were on to something that was needed,” he says. The Trust was the first charity in the world dedicated to preserving and protecting heritage farm livestock, and this year the organisation is celebrating its 50th birthday.
PRESERVING RESILIENCE
The charity’s early days were all about saving breeds from extinction, because so many had already disappeared or been cross-bred out of existence. It’s pretty sobering to think that we’ll never see another Anglesey cow, Middlesex pig, Buff Medway chicken or the gloriously named Pink-Nosed Somerset sheep.
Even so, there are plenty of people who will argue that one sheep (or cow or pig) is much the same as the next, and it doesn’t matter where they come from or what they look like
