Meet Our Trustees
Julian Hosking
MA (Town & Country Planning), FRICS Rural Practice (Retd.), HND (Agriculture), MRAC (Rural Estate Management), FAAV (Retd.), CEnv (Retd.), ACIEEM (Retd.), FLS (Retd.)
Brought up on family farm (dairy, sheep and arable) in East Kent and worked on a wide variety of farms in Kent, Devon, Cornwall, France and Germany.
Employed as a Rural Surveyor and Land Management Adviser by MAFF/ADAS in Kent; a Senior Lecturer in Estate Management subjects at the Royal Agricultural College; a Land Agent/Lead Regional Surveyor and Regional Land Management Adviser for English Nature in the South West; and by Natural England as a Senior Specialist in Rural Land & Estate Management in the South West. Last employed as a Senior Adviser in Invasive Non-native Species, Plant Diseases, and Genetic Resources Diversity Conservation for Natural England (until retirement in 2016).
Invented the “Traditional Breeds Incentive” for English Nature in 2001. This evolved into the “Native breeds at risk grazing supplement” in the Environmental Stewardship Higher Level Scheme in England in 2006 and then “Native breeds at risk supplement” in the Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier scheme in 2014.
Member of the UK Farm Animal Genetic Resources Committee from 2008 to 2018, and a Member of UK Plant Genetic Resources Group (2013 to present). Member of the Traditional Orchard Network, former Trustee of the Somerset Wildlife Trust, and former Trustee of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.
Anthony Richard Howe
BA Sussex, PGCE, Oxon. Farm management trained at Shuttleworth Agricultural College NCFM 1985 (credit)
Anthony was born on a small north Bucks located family farm where, from a very early age, he milked, first by hand and later by machine, twenty Dairy Shorthorn and Ayrshire cows.
Anthony started out in farming part-time on forty-four acres of owned land at Moreton Pinkney, Rugby, Warwicks but later progressed to full-time farming on a series of tenanted farms. The latter included three successive tenanted farms, 40 acres (dairy) in Dorking, Surrey. 82 acres (dairy) in Gloucestershire and finally a 320 acres (mixed farm) in Cornwall.
Anthony milked 100 high-yielding, pedigree show quality Guernsey cows (Blackbrook herd prefix) and has experience in running and managing self-owned and managed farm shops to include the retailing and direct marketing of added value farm produce such as cream, yoghurt, milk and butter.
Anthony has a lifetime of experience in native and rare breeds and he joined as a member of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST) shortly after this organisation was founded in 1973. He has a wide breadth of knowledge in all native breeds of cattle, sheep, pigs, and in most rare breeds of poultry and waterfowl.
Anthony worked for Defra as a Field Officer inspecting farms, livestock, and farm records for 15 years. He is an enthusiastic educationalist with much experience as a qualified teacher and lecturer in schools and colleges. Anthony is passionate about all aspects of country life. He has ridden in point to point racing and is a British Horse Society qualified riding instructor (BHSAI) as well as holding a Lawn Tennis Association Coaching qualification.
Maureen Johnson
LLB (hons), LLM (Leics) FHEA
Maureen is not from a farming background, but grew up in a small village in Derbyshire and began with a career in retail management. She decided to read for a law degree when her children were small and obtained both an LLB (hons) and an LLM in European Commercial law. She is now an academic lawyer specialising in criminal and cyber law and has presented papers at conference all over the world. She has published papers, contributed chapters to academic texts and written a book on criminal law. She is currently completing a PhD at Durham University.
Maureen has kept rare breed poultry all her life, but it was only in 2013, when the family moved to Cambridgeshire on the edge of The Fens, that she was able to begin to expand her menagerie. Maureen is on the committee of the Old English Goat society, and breeds and shows the Ferry House flock of Whitefaced Woodland and Black Wensleydale sheep. She is the coordinator of the RBST Derbyshire Redcap Native Poultry Project.
Maureen is a passionate educator and communicator with a practical love of the countryside and a belief in local, sustainable agriculture as the way forward for both the future of food production and the environment.
Chris Ball
NCA, Rodbaston Agricultural College
Please meet Chris Ball who was born and raised on a family farm in Staffordshire. Chris takes great pride in his farming and breeding work. As Chris would say, “My agricultural working life is my qualification.” Here at British Breeds Revival Trust, we love to hear and benefit from such a positive attitude as that demonstrated by Chris.
Chris took over the running of the family farm at the age of twenty one when he started transforming a fully commercial herd of cattle into a pedigree Holstein herd.
All such achievement was associated with varying but generally good rates of success over a period of several years until the herd was eventually dispersed in 1991. After this time, Chris became a full-time antique dealer whilst at the same time always maintaining and demonstrating a keen interest in rare and native breeds.
This interest took Chris into the realms of the Irish Moiled cattle breed, A breed providing Chris with a record as a director of the breed society for the last twenty-one years, including several years as Chairman.
As well as his Irish Moiled interest, Chris has a small herd of Traditional, Original Population Hereford cattle. Both breeds have been shown with success – the pinnacle and highlight of such achievement being Interbreed Champion at the Three Counties Show in 2017. Chris has also bred Welsh pigs on a purely commercial basis. Chris has also spent six years as a Trustee of RBST and is an ex-chairman of the RBST Staffordshire Support Group.
Regarding the “British Breeds Revival Trust”. Chris feels that there has never been a more important time than now to help in securing the future of all rare and native breeds across the whole of the British Isles.
Original population Dairy Shorthorn calves at Acton Scott Working Farm Museum.
Charles Castle
MA (Cantab) Vet MB MRCVS
Charles grew up on a farm in Yorkshire which his father managed and from an early age, he was fascinated by the natural world and by the interaction between that and the farmed environment. He shared his father’s increasing concern regarding the use of agrichemicals, agreeing with his assessment that mixed farming was far better for the environment than any more specialised system. An early interest in poultry (some 50 years of keeping Light Sussex chickens) blossomed into a desire to train as a veterinary surgeon. He has been conscious of the continuing depletion of diversity in agricultural livestock during the course of his veterinary career. After qualifying at Cambridge as a veterinary surgeon in 1983, Charles has spent his life involved with veterinary and livestock matters.
He has been a member of the RBST for many years, becoming a Trustee for 3 years but not standing for re-election due to the pressure of work within his own veterinary practice.
Charles has a small collection of apple trees planted 30 years ago and has attempted to grow a wide range of plants to encourage biodiversity. He has a long term interest in both preventive medicine and native livestock, and more recently has been managing his cattle using regenerative agricultural principles.
In 2008 after much research, he started a small herd of (NDS) Northern Dairy Shorthorn cattle. He persuaded the RBST to do their first embryo transfer project and with the help of a colleague he designed, implemented and carried out this project that was jointly funded by RBST and other partners. This resulted in the birth of 24 cattle, and the long term storage of 53 embryos. This boosted the project starting point from only an estimated 52-70 NDS cows remaining. This project resulted in the successful storage of genetics relating to some 40% of the original female NDS lines. Whilst more needs to be done to cement the improved position of the NDS cattle breed, the threat of extinction was greatly reduced.
Charles led other breeders in arranging the collection of semen from nine NDS bulls of semen which added a further nine thousand straws to the existing store of 9 bulls (3100 straws) as stored in the RBST frozen semen bank. He now runs an informal NDS cattle breeders group helping to maintain the diversity of the breed using a software package containing details of the ancestry of all living cattle of the breed. He also works with the pure breeders’ group known as the “Traditional Dairy Shorthorn Group” aimed at promoting the Original Population Coates Dairy Shorthorn. He has persuaded this group to collect semen from six (6) Coates herd book registered heritage OP Dairy Shorthorn bulls.
More recently, Charles has designed a breeding back programme for the British Breeds Revival Trust as relating to the Island/Heritage Guernsey cattle breed. The pure, free of global genetics, Guernsey as opposed to the introgressed global Guernsey, is a breed that is now in a parlous state with no pure females surviving. To this day, the Island/Heritage Guernsey is still not officially recognised, other than by the BBRT, as being an endangered and distinct breed that is in need of help to save it from extinction.
Charles’ main area of expertise is advising on breeding decisions to be applied in carefully designed breeding programmes aimed at reviving rare breeds whilst avoiding an excess of inbreeding or any great loss of genetic variability.