On the thirteenth Dorothy and myself were invited to the National Farmers Union annual luncheon at the Brewery Conference centre in London.

Tom did the milking as it was a 7.45 train to arrive in time for the 11.30 start of proceedings photo shoot.

The first is with our national president Ben Gill who was pictured on the site on a visit to Cheshire in 2001.

Next is with the sponsor of the award Kevin Hawkins of the Safeway Supermarket chain.

Finally a group picture with the other finalists.

Left to right: Caerwyn Roberts from North Wales who has a visitor centre on his farm, teaches dry stone walling, is a member of national NFU comities local councillor to name just some of his activities and also a hill farmer and he has been promoting farming for 23 years.

Next was Roger Welberry a farmer from Lincolnshire who has done great things in his passionate promotion of the humble sprout. I had chance to speak to Roger who Dorothy had briefly met in 2001 when he was demonstrating sprout cookery at the national Good Food exhibition in Birmingham.

Roger is credited with his promotional leaflet "A sprout is for life not just for Christmas" To view Roger's recipe's take a look at sprouts.co.uk

I reguarded these two guys as very strong competition and Caerwyn went on to win the David Brown Daily Telegraph award as overall winner judged by the president.

Roger was first to congratulate me as I stepped down from receiving the award.

The ceremonies were over by 2.30 Ben the president was rushing to the airport to catch a plane to Brussels and talking to Kevin Hawkins he was travelling by Eurostar to Paris later that day.

Also sharing the table at the lunch were Gillian van der Meer of the women's farming union, Paul Lay of AGCO and Cedric Porter editor of Farm business magazine together with our own Gill Shearer from the Northwest NFU our public relations secretary.

We had travelled down with friend and turkey farmer Mike Bailey.

The train home was not until 6.30 so we took in a few sights and took the opportunity to visit NFU head office to see just how our national centre works visiting the poultry department with Mike and also the Public relations department.

 

 

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