Dr. David Charles
1940 – Present
Despite being descended from a long line of West Country publicans with small farms and market gardens out the back, David actually grew up in suburbia.
But a series of farm jobs in the school holidays and at weekends in the 1950s, including a spell on a mixed farm in Kent which was also milling and mixing its own livestock rations poultry feed, ignited an interest in farming.
Keen to develop it further, David enrolled at the University of Nottingham’s School of Agriculture at Sutton Bonington in 1959. In the third year it was necessary to do a small research project, which for David was on ventilation of broiler chickens.
Impressed that the poultry sector was already scientific, business oriented, consumer facing and with opportunities for youngsters, he then embarked on a PhD in poultry science, funded by a British Egg Marketing Board scholarship. This was followed by an industry-funded study tour in the US.
“It became clear to me that my future was to work with the many impressive people I had met in the poultry industry,” David later said, so he joined the poultry department of the then National Agricultural Advisory Service, (later the Agricultural Development and Advisory Service, or ADAS)) in 1965.
In the early 1970s, ADAS established the poultry research unit at Gleadthorpe in Nottinghamshire, and David’s role included talking to industry groups about the results of the various research projects undertaken at the facility.
Early work focused on feed saving for layers, coming at the time of the 1973 global energy crisis and rapid rises in the cost of raw materials. Poultry house ventilation was another speciality.
David also undertook a series of lecture tours, fact finding missions, and participated in trade fairs in over 20 countries over the next few years.
In 1988, having always been an admirer of those who created the modern poultry industry, David was involved in the setting up of the poultry museum, working closely with former Poultry World editor John Farrant. This was initially sited at the Royal Showground at Stoneleigh Park, Warwickshire, before moving to the Sacrewell Farm and Country Centre near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire.
David then decided to go freelance in 1996, mostly writing, reviewing, and summarising agricultural research. A life-long interest in agricultural history also led to a book on the history of food and farming in 2002.
In retirement, David became increasingly concerned with the criticism livestock farming was being subjected to, as plant-based diets became more fashionable.
This led him to write or co-write a number of reviews in the Journal of Agricultural Science on the important place which livestock and their manures have had in sustainable agriculture and soil conservation ever since the agricultural revolutions of the 18th century.