Cyberspace has the advantage of enabling journalists to operate from home bases. This is what we at IFBN do, with editors and reporters spread across Western Europe from Switzerland to Northern Ireland, and from Britain to Belgium and France. We have editors in Bedford, Belfast, Cardiff, Ipswich, Falmouth, Brussels, Amsterdam, Toulouse, Lincoln, Stowmarket, Hartfield and Dorchester.
Here is the team. Click on a name for
more details, or scroll down the page.
| Roger Abbott | Jackie Crame | David Dixon |
| Tania Goffart | Richard Halleron | Colin Ley |
| Chris Lyddon | George Macpherson | Gaina Morgan |
| Jacqueline Mortimer | Catherine Paice | Bruce Ross |
| Alan Stennett | Steven Vale |
Members of the IFBN team are also active in other media - some of us produce radio programmes, technical and descriptive videos, books and lectures, or edit magazines and newsletters in our special interest areas. Some of us provide reports and features for international magazines and newsletters. We provide media, political and economic consultancy services as well as training to go with them. IFBN is part of each team member's portfolio within the agricultural industry.
George Macpherson, FRAgS, FRSA, Hon Assoc BVA
 | Independent Farm Business News Home Grown Energy, 72 Bath Road, Wells, Somerset BA5 3LJ Tel: +44 (0)1749 672220 Mobile 07968 849298; |
After Seale Hayne Agricultural College, George worked on farms in Cornwall and Oxfordshire before going to Africa as a UNA volunteer. He spent the next ten years in Africa working on farm projects and became a UN (ILO) technical advisor to Tanzania on 'appropriate technology'. Back in the UK he entered farm journalism, becoming Editor of Big Farm Management, producer then presenter of BBC World Service's The Farming World, and presenter of TVS Farm Focus programme. He worked on Farming News, Farm Contractor and contributed to Farmers Weekly. For many years he was an agricultural careers advisor to Eton College, and for five years he was Secretary of the Oxford Farming Conference. During the eighties and nineties he was a producer and presenter of BBC Radio Four's Farming Today programme. He has written books on biomass energy and farm mechanisation and co-authored a book on farm computing. George is currently Managing Editor of IFBN, Editor of the Clan Macpherson Association journal Creag Dhubh and a Consultant Editor of the magazine Appropriate Technology. He also conducts audio interviews and makes reports for radio and the Internet. George has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Agricultural Societies, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is an Honorary Associate Member of the British Veterinary Association.
Colin Ley
 | P O Box 14748, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9YS, Scotland and: 5 Rue Buzon, Condom, Gers, 32100, France Email:colin.ley@ifbn.co.uk YAC Tel & Fax: 0709 218 6928 France Tel: 00 33 562 281 052 UK Tel: 01334 850231 |
Colin is an experienced agricultural journalist and PR consultant having worked in a broad range of media related to food, farming and fish farming for more than 25 years. Journalistic experience includes the Scottish editorship of Farmers Weekly and Farming News, plus extensive freelance writing for all the major Scottish daily newspapers, the Financial Times, The Field, Grower, Fresh Produce Journal, Flower Business International, Potato Review and other publications. He also has wide broadcasting experience with BBC Scotland, Radio Four and Tyne Tees TV. The development of fish farming has been another key area of work throughout the past 20 years, involving writing for Fish Farmer Magazine, often producing country studies for the publication on developments in Norway, Denmark, France, Spain, etc. On the PR consultancy front, he works with two of fish farming's top international companies, a major UK bank, a leading trade association and a number of company clients. He also has voice-over and programme production experience. Colin travels extensively throughout Europe, reporting on key European agricultural issues and providing detailed coverage of a wide range of international conferences. He maintains business bases in St Andrews, Scotland and Toulouse, SW France.
Catherine Paice
 | Office Tel:01892 523295 |
Catherine Paice has been an agricultural journalist for 18 years, (12 as a freelance) beginning as an editorial assistant on Big Farm Management and ending her salaried career as Business Editor of Farmers Weekly. Specialising in land ownership, occupation, management and values, she has turned her hand to most aspects of agricultural journalism and was a founder contributor to FOL Today - now IFBN. She was brought up in the country, welded to ponies and a local dairy farm. She received her degree in English Literature at Cambridge. After a year travelling and teaching English in South America she spent several years working in the film and television industry in London, also freelancing as a theatre critic, before she swept the bright lights out of her system and returned to her wellies. Catherine's early interest in 'big farm management' has become integral to her work, as many farms have expanded to stay in business but she retains a keen interest in smaller-scale, specialist food production and in the rural community as a whole. She edited the land page in Farmers Weekly until 1995 and continues to contribute to the journal on an ad hoc basis. She created and edited, assisted by George Macpherson, a fortnightly newsletter entitled Terra Firma for two years. Her monthly rural column in the commercial property journal Estates Gazette has been running for 14 years. For the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, she wrote "Rural Britain", about which she gave a paper at the 1995 Oxford Farming Conference. Catherine has contributed to BBC Radio 4 farming and feature programmes; and to five books ranging from general country life to agricultural tax issues; to NFU Countryside magazine and many national newspapers and magazines. After several years in Warwickshire and Wiltshire, she now lives in East Sussex with her children, Sam and Rosanna.
Roger Abbott
 | Brookfield High Road, Swilland, Suffolk IP6 9LP Tel: 01473 784970 Mobile: 07780 661805 |
Roger Abbott is an experienced, all-round journalist who has been reporting on the agricultural industry, the environment and politics for daily newspapers and magazines in Southern Africa and Europe for the past 20 years. While living in South Africa and Zimbabwe, Roger worked for several national newspapers and the Durban-based Farmers Weekly. He moved to England as a Foreign Correspondent, specialising in agriculture and politics, for the influential Argus SA group of newspapers in the early 1980s. Since settling in the UK he has held senior editorial positions on several agricultural publications, including Farming News, British Farmer, the Portsmouth News and Pig Farming. He has been working as a freelance journalist since the end of 1999.
 | Carpenters, Chetnole, Sherborne, Dorset DT9 6PF Tel and Fax: 01935 872695 |
David Dixon, after he had completed a two year course at the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, worked for three years in Uganda on a tea and coffee estate. He moved to Kenya where he spent the next two years on a cattle ranch. That was followed by five years on a large tea estate in western Kenya, first as one of the assistant managers and then taking over as manager. In 1967 he started farming on his own account in Natal, South Africa, where he ran a dairy farm for nine years. He returned to England in 1975, spent a year at Seale-Hayne Agricultural College, and then joined the BBC World Service as producer of the programme 'The Farming World'. David left the BBC in 1997, and later that year joined George Macpherson in supplying news bulletins to Farming Online. In 1998 he became Editor of 'International Agricultural Development'. In 2000 this magazine was merged with 'Appropriate Technology', and David took over as Editor of the enlarged quarterly.
 | 17 Rue Dekens, 1040 Brussels, Belgium Tel: 00322 736 5094 Mob: 00 32 476 423942 |
Bruce Ross manages the independent, Brussels-based consultancy Ross Gordon Consultants, which specialises in the agriculture, food and forest industry sectors. It advises on the future development of relevant EU policies and legislation, including trade-related questions; analyses the possible impact of such developments on its clients' businesses, and assists in creating strategies for change. The consultancy produces market research and policy studies - for example, during 2000 the consultancy produced a study for the European Parliament on the prospects for young farmers in the EU and eastern Europe. Bruce also lectures at the London School of Economics and Political Science on trade and agricultural and food safety issues. Having had practical experience working on farms, Bruce Ross spent eleven years with the National Farmers' Unions of the UK, spending six of those years in the Unions' Brussels office, the last three as Director. While with the NFU in London he worked in the commercial and the livestock departments. From 1993 to 1998 he worked for a Belgian consultancy as its agri-food expert, before leaving to establish his own company. Bruce is a graduate in Modern History from Oxford University.
Alan Stennett
 | Woodhall Junction, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, LN10 6QX Email: alan.stennett@ifbn.co.uk Tel: 01526 352703 Fax: 01526 354491 Mobile: 07976 548157 |
Alan Stennett is directly descended from 'at least' five generations of Lincolnshire farmers, although he left the family farm at the age of 19 to join the BBC in London. During a career that ranged from being a technician, studio manager, script writer and producer for the World Service, the Overseas Services representative in Wales and a science producer for Radios 3 & 4 to producing Outside Broadcasts, music and arts programmes and others for local radio, he has produced and presented Farming Today for Radio 4 and Lincolnshire Farming for BBC Radio Lincolnshire. He has a number of awards for his work, including a national prize for reporting from the RICS. Alan has a degree from the Open University which he claims is unique - 'probably the only first class honours in politics and biochemistry in the world', he says. After 30 years on BBC staff, during which he worked in London, Cardiff, Southampton and Lincoln, Alan went freelance in 1994. Since that time, he has continued his radio involvement, and has branched out into newspaper work - editing the Farming Standard for the Lincolnshire Standard Group for four years - and video production. His work with Primetime Videos as editor and presenter of their 20+ range of vintage farming, farm machinery and rural event videos has also won a number of awards. Although principally involved with arable agriculture, he keeps up to date with horticulture, especially flower and bulb production - as well as vegetable growing - for his local radio output. He has an interest in livestock production because his wife Sue is a member of the council of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust and his brother Pip was a leading exporter of cattle embryos before the BSE crisis. These livestock connections, along with Alan's parallel role as one of IFBN's Duty News Editors, keep him in touch with other sectors. Alan and Sue live in an old railway station, Woodhall Junction, on the banks of the River Witham in central Lincolnshire, where Alan can indulge his enthusiasm for railways, both real and model. They have five children between them, and keep a small herd of pedigree 'unimproved' Lincoln Red cattle and a number of rare breed sheep.
Tania Goffart
 | Leamoor, Trelawney Cottages, Racehill, Launceston, Cornwall PL15 9BJ Email: tania.goffart@ifbn.co.uk Tel: 01566 774498 YAC fax: 0709 234 0209 |
Tania, the youngest member of the IFBN team, has always been involved in the agricultural industry, including time spent working at the Duchy College of Agriculture, Cornwall's agricultural college. As well as specialising in the intricacies of the milk quota market and factors affecting it, she also works as Editorial Assistant on the bi-monthly Agriculture & Equipment International magazine, the journal for large-scale, hi-tech farm businesses, which goes to subscribers in all the agricultural countries of the world. Tania enjoys pursuing her mathematical bent by studying with the Open University and spends much of her spare time indulging her love of horses; (she owns a thoroughbred mare, broken in by herself). She is a keen follower of National Hunt racing.
Christopher Lyddon
 | 113 Manor Rd, Barton-le-Clay, Bedford, Beds MK45 4NS chris.lyddon@ifbn.co.uk Tel: 01582 882746 Fax: 01582 883115 MOB: 07887 942794 YAC forwarding and fax number: 0709 200 6463 |
Christopher Lyddon has spent his career in journalism reporting on agricultural markets, international trade and the making of agricultural policy. He covered Ray MacSharry's CAP reforms in the early 1990s and he was there when they signed the Uruguay Round trade deal in 1994. As a correspondent with the newsletter Agra Europe he covered the development of European policy in Brussels and then specialised in trade issues with the US news agency Knight Ridder (now Bridge news) and later with Reuters in London. Brought up in Worcestershire, he studied in Wales and Germany before heading to Kent and then Brussels. Chris works now from Bedfordshire, which he describes as a compromise between jobs that forced him to go to London to work and a deep seated preference for the countryside. Since last August he has been IFBN's Commodities Editor, covering a wide-ranging brief to shine a light on how agricultural markets around the world work and how FOL's farmer members can best take advantage of change and face new challenges. After studying business management at Swansea and in Mannheim Chris believes in giving readers of his articles a tool for business, instead of the commercial whitewash that he complains much agricultural journalism has become.
 | Marten Michielshof 20,1483 CC De Rijp, Netherlands steven.vale@ifbn.co.uk Tel: 0031 299 674 744 Mob: 0031 629 582 093 |
Steven Vale has worked on farms since his 11th birthday. After completing a four-year course at Moulton Agricultural College in Northamptonshire he spent three months working with irrigation systems at a Kibbutz in Northern Israel. On returning to the UK, he joined the Agricultural Machinery Journal as a trainee journalist, where he followed Reed International's in-house training course. After two years, he also took on the role of machinery correspondent for the Central Office of Information. Then in 1986, he took off on an eight-month trip around the world. In the end, he was away for three years, spending two of these in Sydney, Australia, where he worked as production editor for a number of farming titles, including the Australian Pig Journal, the Australian Poultry Digest, Rural Merchant and Prime Beef Producer. Back in the Europe, he settled in Amsterdam, working freelance. Initially, this centred around What's New In Farming. However, during the last 10 years he has become a regular European contributor to Farming News, Tractor Trader and Arable Farming in the UK. In addition, he is the European Machinery Editor for US-based Implement and Tractor. Finally, two years ago he started writing in Dutch for the first time. He also now writes for the weekly farming paper of the Dutch Farmers Union Oogst and Loonbedrijf the monthly magazine of the Dutch Association of Agricultural Contractors. Today he lives just North of Amsterdam, in an old fishing village, called De Rijp. With frequent visits to the UK and having many contacts in France, Germany, Belgium and Denmark, he is well placed to keep up with developments in the machinery world.
Jacqueline Mortimer
 | P O Box 14748, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9YS and: 5 Rue Buzon, Condom, Gers 32100, France Email: jacqueline.mortimer@ifbn.co.uk France Tel: 0033 562 281 052 UK Tel:01334 479711 YAC Fax: 0709 218 6928 Mob: 07703 469458 |
Jacqueline is an experienced freelance writer and commercial editor. Working both as a journalist and as a technical writer, she has an M. Litt. degree in Writing, plus more than 15 years experience of training writers in commercial organisations and editing commercial copy. As a journalist she specialises in horticulture and business skills development for IFBN, as well as The Scotsman, Scottish Farmer, Fresh Produce Journal and The Grower. Her technical writing and editing work involves one of the UK's top financial institutions and a leading Scottish University. She also has extensive lecturing experience in communication and creative writing. She is a published fiction writer. A French language specialist (B.Ed degree), Jacqueline is currently developing a farm business news analysis service based in France but translated into English. She has business bases in St Andrews, Scotland and Toulouse, SW France.
Gaina Morgan ARAgS
 | Marlas HOUSE, Pyle, Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan, Wales CF33 4PE gaina.morgan@ifbn.co.uk Tel: 01656 743983 Fax: 0709 219 5918 Mob: 07866 556620 |
Gaina Morgan is a journalist, broadcaster, and farmer. She and her farmer husband, David, are based in their native South Wales, where the family can trace their farming credentials in that area back to the Norman Conquest. Her biggest challenge is to help ensure that the next generation have the opportunity, if they wish, to continue farming their patch, in the face of encroaching development and financial constraints. Gaina believes that farmers need to work together in varying degrees to overcome the present difficulties. She's deeply committed to the local Farmers Market and is a director of the embryonic Welsh Meat Company. She has spent much of the past 20 years in agricultural journalism, primarily producing and presenting for BBC Wales radio and television and Radio Four's Farming Today, although her roots go back to the old Farmer and Stockbreeder days ... when it was still produced in Fleet Street. Gaina is now freelance and enjoys the challenge of the daily news round as one of IFBN's Duty News Editors. Her hobbies include her three children, riding, and rounding up sheep. Gaina has been elected as an Associate of the Royal Agricultural Societies of the United Kingdom.
Richard Halleron, BSc, BAgr
 | 30 Garnock Hill, Black's Road, Belfast BT10 0AW richard@farm-link.com Tel: 02890 616960 (and forwarding YAC No) Fax:0709 216 9709 |
An agricultural chemist by profession, Richard Halleron has been actively involved in all aspects of European dairy and livestock production for almost 20 years. He brings to IFBN a unique insight into how developments within the UK milk industry can relate to a global context. As a staff member with the Ulster Farmers Union in the eighties he was centrally involved in the development of that organisation's policy across a range of livestock sectors. This led to the development of close links with key players in the European Commission and the various government departments throughout the British Isles. In his role as a marketing consultant, he subsequently represented the interests of Golden Vale, now one of the largest dairy and food processors in Europe. Richard has been IFBN dairy editor since 1999. He writes about changes at research, political and commercial levels in the world's leading milk producing nations because all aspects of milk production are strongly influenced by international developments. Richard assists Farming Online members to adapt to this new global situation by providing technical, market and other relevant information with which to make management decisions.
Jackie Crame
 | Garden House, Church Rd, Battisford, Stowmarket, Suffolk IP14 2HF jackie.crame@ifbn.co.uk Tel: 01449 722452 Outgoing line: 01449 720770 Fax: 01449 720770 Mob: 0774 778 4027 |
Jackie Crame has been an agricultural journalist since 1982. She gained a BSc degree in agriculture from Sutton Bonnington, Nottingham University and worked as an agronomist for British Sugar and Framlingham Farmers in Suffolk, before becoming arable correspondent for Farmers Weekly. Jackie is married and lives in Suffolk where she is a freelance crops correspondent. She covered the Eastern Region for Prestel Farmlink News, the first computerised agricultural news network (also produced by Home Grown Energy). Jackie's husband Nick is also actively involved in agriculture. He founded and still runs the company Gromax, which manufactures and supplies crop covers throughout the United Kingdom and Europe.
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