FIRSTLY, I would like to thank my predecessor Paul Williams for his leadership as the NFU Cymru Clwyd county chairman.

Paul, who will now take on the role of Clwyd county president, will I know still be proactive and continue to bring his knowledge and wisdom to the role and us as a county – felly diolch yn fawr i ti Paul.

As for my history, I have spent the last 23 years working within the agricultural education sector at Llysfasi, now part of Coleg Cambria, with the last 16 of those years mainly managing the farm.

Prior to Llysfasi, I spent a short amount of time working in the schools sector and have previously worked on beef, sheep, dairy and arable farms in Wales, England and the United States, in the Bush Jr and Bill Clinton era. My formal education included periods at Llysfasi, the Welsh Agricultural College (WAC) and Harper Adams University.

During the Clwyd AGM held in early December, and on behalf of the Clwyd county, it was a pleasure to award Terrig Morgan the inaugural Dafydd Jones Memorial Cup.

The cup is awarded in recognition of the NFU Cymru Clwyd member who has made the best contribution to agriculture.

Terrig has certainly set the bar high for the cup going forward.

The cup was presented to Terrig by Dafydd’s son Sion, with wife Mair also in attendance.

The AGM was also attended by Aled Jones, NFU Cymru deputy president, and John Mercer, NFU Cymru director.

It was nice to welcome them both to the region yet again this year.

The main speaker for the evening was Professor Glyn Hewinson, who leads the TB Centre of Excellence at Aberystwyth University.

The key messages I picked up were that we still need to know more about TB, both in the cows themselves and its means of transmission between cows or between cows and their environment, including wildlife.

The most exciting work surrounds the current development of a vaccine, where the cows would subsequently be recognised as vaccinated and not as positive reactors.

Hopefully, this work will be at the field trials stage soon.

From all of this, there may be better control strategies that will come to light, plus we can learn a lot from the strategies of other countries.

We must be grateful that this high level work is being carried out here in Wales so that we can hopefully, eventually and once and for all, tackle this costly and most distressing disease.

The next two years will bring its fair share of opportunities, challenges and changes and I look forward to serving and representing the county of Clwyd through these interesting times.

DEWI JONES

Chairman

NFU Cymru Clwyd