Farm Of The Week: It’s back to normality for Boxster

His name will be familiar to many who have never met him. He owns Hallmark Boxster, the bull saved by a legal battle which eventually forced Defra to repeat a bungled test for TB.

It cost £124,000 in legal fees to get the all-clear Ken always predicted, plus 18 months of lost business, plus time at the High Court and the stress of doing all that on a remortgage and an overdraft. Defra offered £90,000 and he has now settled for it, rather than go back to court. But he did get to keep his bull. And he has ensured a bit more rigour in a testing regime which almost certainly makes more mistakes than Defra wants to admit.

“If you had told me in the first place what it would cost me, I would probably still have done it,” he says now.

Forlorn Hope Farm is usually described as near Doncaster. It is actually in the Selby district of North Yorkshire, strictly speaking – about halfway down from Ferrybridge power station towards Doncaster, between M1 and M18, where tourists never go but where horizons are wide and farming is everywhere. The nearest village is Stubbs Walden, which some maps and signs call Walden Stubbs as a result of some never-corrected misunderstanding.

Ken Jackson, 67, grew up around here, working for a father who set up three farms for three sons. Ken took this one over when he got married, in 1971, and later restored its old name, which was bestowed by church landlords in commemoration of a critical win over the French in the battle for Canada.

They started with 52 acres and an old-fashioned mix of this and that – a small dairy herd, from which wife Anita made butter for sale, 25 sows and a boar, a couple of goats and some chickens. At one point, they got up to a thousand hens, which was intensive in those days. But Ken’s main interest was always cattle. And in 1984, he spent £860 on a Blonde d’Aquitaine heifer in a dispersal sale. His brother said it was a good job their dad had already passed away.

Beef farmers were beginning to realise the value of Continental breeds and a lot were betting on the Charolais. Ken thought Blondes were a good smaller-boned alternative and he still does. It was the Limousin which eventually became ubiquitous but the Blondes picked up enough supporters to start a British breed and Kendal Jackson and Forlorn Hope Farm are big names in that circle.

The farm built up to about 160 acres, including 70 rented, growing some arable crops but specialising in beef and Blonde bloodstock. Ken got up to fattening about 300 cross-breds and dairy herd spares at a time, bought in as calves and stores and taken through to sale at Selby market. Alongside them the pedigree Blonde herd, with a breeding core of about 50, produced bulls for sale and its own replacements for older cows being culled out.

A few years ago, they lost about 20 cattle, most of them pedigree Blondes, which drank polluted water in a rented pasture a few miles up the road and died with their eyes turned electric blue. Ken took an anonymous call from a man who told him about illegal tipping of furnace ash. But nothing was ever proved.

Even before the Boxster saga started, Ken had decided to draw his boundaries back a bit, run down the standard beef herd and concentrate on the Blondes. As he sums up, it costs no more to feed the animals and any not good enough for breeding can go for beef anyway.

The last two bulls he sold fetched £4,000 and £5,000. And Boxster, born autumn 2006, from an AI bull and a show cow, looked like being the sort of pay-off a pedigree herd is all about. Ken turned down £12,000 for him as a youngster and at the beginning of 2010, coming into his prime, with a wall full of show rosettes and some good first calves to prove his merit, he was probably worth £20,000. But then he missed two summers when he should have been underlining his promise. “You can cross the best bull in the country with the best cow and be disappointed,” says Ken. “But that’s good. Otherwise, everybody would have the best.”

His family boast of his ability to spot a beauty in disguise. And he uses science too. He made money out of his first heifer by using AI on her and then paying an expert to flush out four fertilised eggs and plant them in Jersey heifers. He still does the same from time to time. Embryo transplantation is trickier and more expensive than AI.

But it speeds up the rate of improvement in a herd and allows the most promising babies to be born to the best sucklers.

He has 21 eggs on ice from a mating between Boxster and his best-ever cow, Nectarine, who died a year ago. “I did not dare risk using them before the end of the court case,” he says. “But looking forward to seeing the results of them one day was keeping me going.”

Meanwhile, there should be calves next spring as an entirely natural consequence of Boxster’s exuberant return to the herd in August.

The beef fattening business is finished. But the farm now has a successful wood recycling business, supplying bedding for livestock and horses, managed by Ken and Anita’s son, Paul, 41, who also oversees the day-to-day running of the farm.

A daughter, Kate McNeil, 37, who lives nearby, is well known on the show circuit and led Boxster to many of his victories. She is married to a businessman and has her own career, in the NHS, but she played a big part in the Boxster story. She started off as a lab technician. And knowing how easily a blood sample could be spoiled, she led the attack on Defra’s insistence that there was no reason to doubt its test on Boxster. Technicians had had difficulty getting a sample and had mixed two.

On the way to proving this was a serious error, Kate was amazed at the number of ways in which the existing ramshackle system might get it wrong. For example, the ‘skin test’ for TB, on which so much depends, amounts to the difference in the bumps made by two pinches of flesh – one before an injection of sterilised TB culture and one after. Pinches vary. Animals vary. Kate is writing a book explaining how they came to doubt almost everything the vets said was certain.

“One thing I am sure of,” she says, “is they should be taking a long hard look at the whole system.”