It gives me great pleasure and a good deal of satisfaction to be opening the batting for the producers’ team. It really is an extremely rare occurrence under present circumstances to have a pig farmer at the top of the producer tree. Anyway, I'll endeavour to cope with this unaccustomed elevation as best as I can.

The land that I farm is situated on the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds near Driffield. It is all Grade 2 arable land. I was extremely fortunate in that my grandfather was the farmer and that my mother was his only child. This meant that, as his eldest grandson, I had the ideal opportunity to enter farming. This I did on leaving Agricultural College in 1970. At that stage we farmed 445 acres. This was later increased to 870 acres in 1974 when we purchased a neighbouring farm. The two farms are only about 3 miles apart by road and are farmed as one unit. The crops grown are ware potatoes, winter cereals, oilseed rape and grass leys. The grass leys are grazed by a breeding sheep flock of 400 ewes and a pedigree herd of Limousin Cattle.