News

30th November 2011

Prestigious Award goes to North Wales Texel breeder and Society Regional Director

Alwyn Phillips receives the John Gittens Memorial Award 2011 at this years Welsh Winter fair

Alwyn Phillips

One of the most progressive sheep farmers in Wales, Alwyn Phillips, of Pen y Gelli, Ffordd Bethel, Caernarfon, has won the 2011 John Gittins Memorial Award in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the Welsh sheep industry.

A leading practitioner and advocate of improving the breeding and performance of sheep through recording and computer tomography (CT), lambs from his flock were, in 1993, the first in the UK to be CT scanned.

Brought up on his grandparents’ dairy farm in North Wales, he began his working life with a five-year apprenticeship in electrical engineering before switching careers by becoming a student at Glynllifon Agricultural College and then spending a year on an international student exchange scheme in Denmark.

Mr Phillips farms 60 hectares, a mixed unit of sheep, cattle and arable. Sheep form the main enterprise and he has been improving their breeding and performance since 1975. In 1978 his Welsh Half-breds won the MLC award for the best lowland flock in Britain. In that year he established a frequent lambing flock of pedigree Poll Dorsets and, in 1980, a flock of Texels which is now in the top one per cent of the UK National Texel Breeding Evaluation performance flocks.

Over the last 30 years Mr Phillips has been a pioneering figure in sheep improvement using cutting edge methods. He was the first flockmaster in Wales to practice cervical Artificial Insemination on his own sheep and has passed on his knowledge and experience in improvement techniques to other sheep farmers and to students at a number of universities. He has also played a leading role in setting up numerous schemes and organisations in the sheep sector of farming including the Elite Texel Sire Reference Group (ETS). Subsequently, he was a founder and is past chairman of Cofnodi Texel Cymreig (CTC), a sire referencing group for Welsh Texel breeders which instigated the first ever sale dedicated to performance recorded sheep in the UK. He was founder chairman of the North Wales Texel Breeders Club and among other offices is North Wales Director of the British Texel Sheep Society, the largest sheep society in Europe. In 1999 he was awarded a Welsh Sheep Strategy scholarship to New Zealand.

Mr Phillips, who has hosted many overseas academics and groups of farmers at his farm in Caernarfon, has judged Texel and Poll Dorset sheep at numerous shows and is a former chairman and club leader of Caernarfon YFC.

He was one of 11 candidates for this year’s award in memory of Montgomeryshire farmer John Gittins who pioneered the Welsh Mule Sheep breed which, together with the Welsh Half-bred, contributed significantly to the economy of Welsh agriculture.