Jayne very kindly gave me this title in her comment under my last post. Jayne, I am flattered!

For those who don’t know, RB was an 18th century landowner/farmer with a passion for improving livestock ie cattle and sheep. This was all pre Medelian genetics of course so was based purely on observation and trial and error. There is a good brief intro to him here. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/bakewell_robert.shtml
He is a rather controversial figure now in these revisionist days but there is no doubt that he “set a hare running” which is still going now. Before him and like minded people, animal breeding was pretty much left to chance. Males and females were left together for much of the time and it was survival of the fittest rather than the best for agricultural purposes.

That in itself is an interesting thought. Many of the characteristics which make livestock more profitable and valuable for the farmer also make the animal less able to survive. Heavy fat sheep fall over on their backs and can’t get up when they are in full fleece.Cattle with enormous productive udders get mastitis regularly unless pampered and fussed over and no modern highly bred farm animal could survive a winter without supplementary food even down here in relatively mild Devon.

He was one of the pioneers of the Agriculturual Revolution which preceded the Industrial Revolution. In fact, if it hadn’t happened there would never have been an Industrial Revolution in this country because as people moved to towns and labour left the countryside, farming needed to be more productive to feed the population with less available labour. I remember that being drummed into me at school but it is often forgotten when the subject of industrial development comes up either in an historic or modern sense.

To get back to Jayne’s point. I would say I am following on from the “Robert Bakewells” of The Macaulay Institute who developed the cashmere and did all the hard work but I am focussed of course on a luxury product. Bakewell and his peers were trying to produce more food. This was not without opposition from some who saw this as interference with the settled order of nature. Perhaps we should think of Monsanto and the GM pioneers as the real heirs of Robert Bakewell? Now that really does take some sticking but its probably more accurate!