Forget Bridges and Wayne, for true grit see Hans
Determination and perseverance are two admirable qualities and it occurred to me recently on a disadvantaged, less favoured area Northumbrian hill farm that my friend Hans Porksen has more of both than most.
He was showing round two people with contrasting views on sheep – me, who can take, or preferably leave, them and a mutual college friend Gareth Rees.
As a lifetime sheep man, a Welshman who makes Yorkshire men seem polite and reticent, and as old friends expected to trade insults, I expected Gareth to give Hans and his sheep a hard time.
In more than two hours inspecting 650 breeding ewes of several breeds, ditto several groups of rams, Gareth couldn’t muster a worthwhile insult. When he said there were some superb sheep I checked my hearing. But he meant it.
Hans, second youngest of a senior German clergyman’s family of 14, came alone to Britain as a 15 year old to learn English and about farming. He has been remarkably successful at both.
He worked as a dairy herdsman in Wales before being offered a share farming partnership, but insteadcompletedacourse at Wiltshire farm institute. We met a year later at Harper Adams in 1965 on the old National Diploma of Agriculture course where he soon became one of the few students everyone knew.
He credits me for introducing him to Northumberland with an invitation to stay at our family farm. That was the first of several journeys over the years where I drove and he talked on a range of subjects way
beyond farming. He still does.
After college he had a stint as a dairy farm manager then thought about his long-term future and took a teacher training course. In 1971 he became a lecturer at Northumberland’s agricultural college, Kirkley Hall.
He always seemed to absorb knowledge and practical experience more rapidly than most of us and put it to immediate good use. From 1980 he led a sheep course at Kirkley Hall which not only acquired a national reputation for producing quality shepherds, it made a profit.
But he was determined to farm on his own. While still a lecturer, he and his wife Audrey bought a small house with a few acres and established the Hans prefix Suffolk flock.
From the start he took what I have always thought is the only rational approach to pedigree sheep breeding. That is, to measure and evaluate whatever can be measured and evaluated and sell and buy on those results rather than pay silly prices for whatever happens to be the fashionable breed type at the time.
Hans saw, correctly, no reason why sheep breeding should not be as scientific and produce as dramatic a change in such factors as growth rate and muscle percentage in sheep as we’ve seen in the past half century in pigs
and poultry, or in milk yields in dairy farming.
He has not been entirely alone – Malcolm Stewart, Andrew Elliot and Richard Oates among others spring to mind – but following logic and science in sheep breeding has been a hard row to hoe. There is still a fixed belief among many sheep breeders that all that counts is the stockman’s eye. Never mind measuring everything that can be and analysing the results, the wonderful shape of that head must be worth £10,000.
Hans, with the determination and perseverance that also finally got him a tenancy at Gallows Hill, took a different route and his Suffolk and Texel flocks have for years been among the highest rated genetic-index flocks in the UK. Shown in natural condition and not the forcefed specimens to be seen at every breed sale, he sells rams direct from the farm.
He has also found time to fight for more transparency in lamb marketing, tried hard to “get farming’s message over to the public” and take an active role in the National Farmers Union, most recently as county chairman.
He has had disappointments, not least the Brexit leave vote after arguing strongly to remain. He was still giving reasons to stay in the European Union during our visit. He doesn’t give up easily. That’s why he’s achieved what he has.