I cannot believe that it is 60 years ago since a number of my National College of Agricultural Engineering (Silsoe) classmates and I joined the IAgrE as Student Members. In fact, I had completely forgotten how long it was until Kit embarrassed me at the 2026 IAgrE Awards event by telling the attendees that he had just signed my 60 year Long Service Certificate. When the said document arrived a few days ago it was accompanied with a letter from Kit suggesting I might like to recall some of my memorable experiences for Membership Matters – so here goes!
During my career I have been richly rewarded by gaining satisfaction from my role as the supervisor of very many master and doctoral students. Back in 2013 during the opening ceremony for the Douglas Bomford Lecture Theatre at Harper Adams University, Dr. Mark Moore began the series of short presentations by stating “That he had the best job in the world!”. He was then followed by several other of my former PhD students from around the globe who all made the same claim. I decided not to mention my own position namely: “That co-supervising Mark and a further 60+ doctoral students had been a pleasure and that, as a result I had had the best job in the world!”. In the end we all agreed that we had been very fortunate to choose agricultural engineering as a career.
As I look back, I would say that I totally agree with the words of former educators who have claimed that the greatest satisfaction from their career in teaching and research comes from observing the career achievements of former students. Good luck to them, may they continue to be successful in their chosen career paths.
It would be remiss of me not to take this opportunity to thank all those IAgrE members who were an inspiration to me and helped in so many ways over the past 60 years. I thank you all.