Poignant win for farmer in TB legal fight

Apart from an outing to the Lincoln Show earlier this summer, Mr Jackson, from Stubbs Walden, near Doncaster, had not shown any cattle for well over a year until yesterday.

The well-known British Blondes breeder has been preoccupied with a legal fight with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to save his best-ever Blonde bull, Hallmark Boxster, condemned in March 2010 on the basis of a badly-performed TB test.

Boxster remains in quarantine, pending a final round of the argument, but one of his sons, Stubbs Walden Endeavour, born September 2009, was judged best male and reserve junior champion in his breed yesterday. Mr Jackson said: “It’s nice to be back.”

Champion of the beef breed champions, in the first big interbreed final of the show, was a Beef Shorthorn bull, Trojan of Craigeassie, brought by Sally Horrell of Peterborough and led by her stockman, Roy McDonald. The six-year-old bull, bought at Perth, works as stock bull in a pedigree herd and has had sons sell at up to 14,500 guineas.

Second was a five-year-old Limousin cow, Brockhurst Bolshoi, owned by WJ and M Mash of Buckinghamshire but led out, and prepared for the show, by freelance stockman Dougie McBeath of Stirling, who has been feeding and grooming her since April.

Third was a home-bred Hereford bull from father and son team, Tim and William Livesey of Normanton Polled Herefords, Leicestershire. His secret, they reckoned, was plenty of mushrooms in his feed, from their other business.

Competition compere Mike Keeble told the crowd he thought he could predict the future of the beef business – a return to slow rearing on grass, subsidised by environmental payments for running grazing animals on ground which needed them.

He said the 16 breeds in the competition illustrated the range of resources the British beef industry had assembled for tackling any problem.

The competition did not include a champion from the commercial beef crosses, which will be chosen this morning, kicking off a second day of cattle competitions.

Mr Keeble’s commentary included a rundown, for the benefit of spectators, on the history of each breed on show and the reasons it had been cultivated.

The Longhorn, he said, was the “daddy of them all” – the first to be bred specifically for beef, in the 18th century.

The Beef Shorthorn was descended from it. And the Belgian Blue was descended from prize Shorthorns taken to the Continent by Dutch farmers – and now re-imported and refined once again into the British Blue.

The Galloway was made for “wet and wind and cold” and the Belted Galloway was a variation designed to be more easily seen in a mist. The Highlander was “the toughest of all” with three coats, amounting to “woolly vest and knickers right down to the skin”.

The Hereford was a world leader in the commercial beef business until the changing face of society required faster-growing and leaner animals and the Continental breeds began to take over.

British breeders had risen to the challenge and our own cattle were now growing big and lean, he said. He told spectators: “I hope you will go home with some understanding of the complex business you see illustrated here.

“I hope you will talk to your butcher, whether an independent or a supermarket department, and find out more about where your meat is coming from and about getting the best from some of the difficult cuts.”