crossed when Howard handed in his notice. His two decades and more of work with a variety of trade associations in a cross-section of different industries had at least prepared him well for the challenges ahead. He was used to negotiating to find compromise between different interests, and he had built up many contacts and not a few close friendships within the feed industry. He also had a good deal of experience in compiling magazines, as most trade associations in those days would produce a regular in-house title and Howard had often been given the responsibility of putting them together. This perspective also helped him to identify that the feed sector in the UK was quite a significantly sized one for it not to have its own, dedicated magazine. I can still hear him today, as I remember back to those early days, explaining on the phone to a sometimes sceptical audience that agriculture was the UK’s largest industry and feed its single biggest input. And yet the only magazines serving the country’s feed manufacturers either lumped them in together with seed, fertilisers and agro-chemicals or with the flour millers and/or were international titles covering a vastly diverse range of climates and conditions and livestock systems. He strongly believed that the sector in the UK was large enough to justify its own monthly magazine, and bloody-minded enough to prove he was right by doing it! Perhaps it was the fear of failure and the loss of face which (in his
eyes) would have followed, to say nothing of the financial consequences, but he set about the task like a man possessed. So successful was he that, from the very first issue and with no subscription revenue, he was able to convince a sufficient number of advertisers to support the new title that the business loan was never drawn upon. I remember thinking things must be going OK when he was able to buy himself a new company car after about six months; it was only very modest (a Honda Accord if I recall) but it had electric windows (front only, but nevertheless an absolute luxury in those days so far as I was concerned!) It is interesting to look back now at those first issues and see the
topics which were covered, the people who were writing, the companies which were advertising and so on. The first things which strike me are the number of pages, and how very little use of colour was made. January 1981 issue amounted to 48 pages, with subsequent months varying but never more than that and sometimes as low as 40 pages; these days 64 pages is more the norm. Today, we also use colour throughout; to add colour to an eight page section in the 1980s was to accept a significantly higher printing bill and that colour would only be available on those eight pages spread evenly throughout the magazine. This was a consequence of how short run magazines were, and still are, printed on large sheets of paper equivalent to the eight pages ‘to view’, before being folded, stapled and cut to form the finished product. Some of the topics covered in those early issues could very well
be titles for articles in the magazine today, while others are very much a product of their time. The principal editorial in the first issue was about how the Common Agricultural Policy was putting the dairy sector at crisis point (the EEC and the CAP would be the subject of most of the Opinion columns in that first year). The inaugural issue also included a survey of mycotoxins and a piece about fishmeal for ruminants. One article, by Bob Pickford, looked at ‘Feeding the Cow Not the Rumen’ while the aforementioned Desmond Bird (writing under his own name at this stage) discussed ‘The Copper in Pig Feeds Saga’.
40th Anniversary Congratulations
United Molasses GB Ltd have been proud supporters of the Feed Compounder magazine for many years and we would like to congratulate them on celebrating their 40th anniversary and look forward to continuing to work with them for many years to come.
KEEP CALM
AND MOLASSES FEED
For more information about us and our extensive range of molasses products animal feed manufacture please give us a call on 0151 955 4850 or visit us at
www.unitedmolasses.com FEED COMPOUNDER JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 PAGE 31
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