Nuffield Conference: Sustainability champion scoops top award

The Nuffield Bullock Award recognises those who have made the best use of their Nuffield scholarship in the 10 years since they were accepted on to the study tour scheme.

This year, the judges gave the top honour to Jonty Brunyee, a Cotswolds farmer who they wished to recognise for his enormous capacity for bringing food producers together to take positive action. 

We meet him and the other finalists.

See also: Two winners for Nuffield Bullock Award in 2023 

Winner: Jonty Brunyee

If there’s been an upbeat farming initiative in the south of England in the past decade, there’s a good chance Jonty Brunyee may have been involved.

Hailing originally from the family arable farm in Nottinghamshire, Jonty did a degree in rural resource management at Seale Hayne.

He started his career as a farm adviser before later taking a job as a lecturer at the Royal Agricultural University (RAU) in Cirencester in 2014 – shortly before doing his Nuffield scholarship, entitled Building a sustainable farm business.

This was a re-energising moment in his career, he says, giving him the inspiration and impetus to launch new teaching modules to equip students for a career in agriculture where there would be as much focus on the environment as food production.

New energy

“Nuffield gave me more fire in my belly to make a difference,” says Jonty, although he says he now has a problem with the word “sustainable” as too often the implication is only to preserve what we have.

This is insufficient in a world where many farmers’ wellbeing and profit are still falling, as well as the quality of the environment and biodiversity, he says.

The drive to tackle these issues in a different way saw him leave RAU in 2019 to become the first employee of FarmED, a demonstration farm with meeting facilities near Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, which now welcomes more than 20,000 visitors a year.

He left there in July 2023 to focus on his own consultancy business as well as farming in his own right as a tenant of the National Trust with his wife Mel.

They farm and market pasture-fed beef, lamb and pork direct to the consumer.

Continual convener

It is his current off-farm initiatives that particularly impressed the judges.

Five years ago he was involved in the launch of the North East Cotswold Cluster Group, and helped it become the largest group of its type in the country.

Members representing 65,000ha now work together to unlock new sources of funding.

He also founded Emergent Generation, a free-to-join network for farmers aged 18-35.

Its aim is to forge new connections among those interested in regenerative agriculture. Jonty  describes it as the best thing he’s done in his career, with gatherings of up to 90 people so far and plans for further growth.

He is also involved in efforts to either reopen or replace Long Compton Abattoir.

For his continual ability to launch new initiatives and, in the true spirit of Nuffield, bring people together for their own benefit, the judges felt Jonty was a worthy winner in another year when all the finalists were of a very high standard.

Finalists

Davina Fillingham

Davina Fillingham © Reverberate PR

An agribusiness adviser and chartered surveyor by training, Davina Fillingham titled her scholarship report Precision agriculture: In the field and beyond the farm gate.

She saw the growth of the technology as an opportunity not just for improvements in farmer productivity, but also as a tool for the sector with its environmental credentials.

The Yorkshire-based professional said her “light-bulb” moment on tour came after seeing academics at the University of South Australia demonstrate how they could model the impact of a plough board on soil down to a particle level.

It was then she realised how beneficial this technology could be if it was scaled up to be able to measure impact at a country or sector level.

Determined to do her part to reach this ambitious goal, she brought together farmers, researchers, technology developers and educational institutions with the support of the Yorkshire Agriculture Society to form the Agri-Sense group.

Its activities include advice on accessing funding and on-farm demonstration days of emerging technology available to farmers, the first series of which takes place this week across Yorkshire.

Aled Rhys Davies

Aled Rhys Davies © Reverberate PR

Businessman Aled Rhys Davies set out to investigate one of the world’s most significant looming problems for his Nuffield scholarship – antimicrobial resistance.

Campaigners on this topic frequently level criticism at the global livestock industry for being prolific users of antibiotics at a time when the number of effective bacteria-fighting drugs are dwindling.

As a salesman for a global disinfectant manufacturer at the time, this was a problem Aled was familiar with, but it was on his study tour that he came across a potentially game-changing alternative – outcompeting harmful bacteria with benign strains.

In 2017, he founded Pruex, a company that aimed to help farmers reduce their antibiotics use by spraying these probiotic products onto bedding and drinkers to change the balance of populations of bacteria rather than using antibiotics to kill them.

Pruex now has 600 UK customers and operates in several countries in Africa and Europe, selling products for a variety of livestock sectors.

Aled is seeking funding from Innovate UK for additional research and development – including for a product that may help tackle bovine TB.

Aled Rhys Jones

Aled Rhys Jones © RWAS

A stint as assistant chief executive at the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society (RWAS) kindled a passion in Aled Rhys Jones for the rural events scene that led to him doing a Nuffield entitled Agricultural societies and shows: where do we go from here?

He set out to study the global phenomenon that is the country show, including the burgeoning state fair scene in the US.

Back at home, a period of working in other roles followed, including as a broadcaster, until the chief executive position at RWAS became vacant in 2022 and he was the winning applicant for the job.

He credits his scholarship research, and the contacts he made, with playing a pivotal role in winning the support of the organisation.

His achievements since becoming the leader of the body, which delivers Wales’s flagship farming events, have included turning a budget deficit into a surplus, leading the response to a cyberattack and modernising some aspects of the show offering.

The role of a show in farming society is changing, Aled says, with the original objective of knowledge exchange for farmers no longer as pivotal.

Instead, the flagship Royal Welsh Show is a shop window for Welsh farming, with the food hall in particular helping new products with great provenance get under the nose of consumers and supermarket buyers.

Ali Capper

Ali Capper © NFU

After a 20-year career in marketing and advertising, Ali Capper says her Nuffield studying the export of British hops and niche apple varieties gave her the confidence she needed to return to the farming sector without feeling like an imposter.

She was spurred into participating after being told “if you’ve got a passion and a problem, then you need to do a Nuffield”.

For Ali, that passion was for modernising the way first hops, and now fruit, is marketed overseas.

She currently serves as executive chair of British Apples and Pears, a grower organisation set up to represent the interests of UK growers and increase their market share.

It’s the latest in a broad range of industry roles Ali has held, including a six-year stint as the chair of the NFU Horticulture and Potatoes Board that ended in 2022.

Among her notable achievements are appearances before parliamentary committees, including the House of Commons select committee on fairness in the supply chain.

She also credits her Nuffield with supporting her understanding of how growers and marketers in other parts of the world market their product, which has helped her lead initiatives to increase the competitiveness of British produce, especially at the key international trade fairs.