The Schöffel Countryside Awards – meet the judges

A melting pot of knowledge and experience  

It makes sense to start with the judge who – thanks to Amazon hit series Clarkson’s Farm and a good sense of humour – our audience will be most familiar with: Charlie Ireland. If you’ve watched the show, you’ll know ‘Cheerful’ Charlie as Jeremy Clarkson’s straight-talking mentor, but he brings a wealth of experience to the awards judging panel, having advised farm businesses on all sorts from strategy to agronomy for the past 20 years.  

Equally well-known in farming and conservation circles is Tim Furbank, the director of Oakbank Game & Conservation, a company which has been helping its clients boost biodiversity alongside productive farming operations since 2004 through a mixture of advice, on-the-ground surveys, the supply of seed mixes, and more.  

Kirsty Brannan has a slightly different focus, in that she now works solely for The Crown Estate – a role which entails a great deal of liaison with tenants across lowland England as she strives to develop and deliver nature recovery projects on a landscape scale. While Stewart McIntyre, a former gamekeeper and Gold Award winner in the Purdey Awards for Game and Conservation who now works for the Soil Association, has demonstrated how intensive food production and wildlife conservation can exist in harmony with the right approach.  

Not surprisingly, a good number of those who make up the panel would be worthy of the various awards themselves; many have won awards in the past – and if they haven’t, they deserve to...   

Spearheading successful and impressive projects of varying scales are Jake Freestone and John Pawsey. In the past five years, Jake, a Nuffield Farming Scholar who manages a 1,600- hectare farm in Gloucestershire, has picked up a range of accolades including ‘Soil Farmer of the Year’ from the Farm Carbon Toolkit, the Farmer’s Weekly ‘Environmental Champion’, ‘Arable Innovator of the Year’ at the British Farming Awards, and the BBC Food and Farming ‘Future of Farming’ award – to name just a few. John, meanwhile, oversees the management of over 1,500 hectares of organic production in Suffolk, which includes an agroforestry system and is supplemented by diversifications including environmental schemes, commercial and domestic rentals, and renewable energy projects. 

Jake Fiennes is another example of someone who has been there and done it – and he’s still doing it three decades later. Now director of Holkham National Nature Reserve and general manager of conservation at the Holkham Estate in Norfolk, where a diverse jigsaw of habitats – think farmland, woodland, parkland, saltmarsh, and coastline – sit side by side, he works closely with a host of bodies and organisations, being well placed to share his learnings with others.  

Indeed, a common theme among our judges is their eagerness to share their knowledge and bring people together. Rhys Williams, Shaun Leonard and Jim Egan have all more than done their bit in this regard. Rhys, a livestock farmer and farm business consultant from North Wales, specialises in grazing management and regenerative farming among other things; Shaun, as director of the Wild Trout Trust, has for many years been restoring rivers and empowering others to do the same through expert advice and habitat improvement projects; and Jim – the founder of the  Big Farmland Bird Count –  works closely with land managers as a sustainable farming advisor, providing farm-gate support and working across the whole agricultural supply chain.  

We’re talking, in most cases, about lifetimes dedicated to improving the countryside and the prospects of the species that call it home. Owen Williams, another of the Welsh contingent on the panel, has dedicated the past two decades to learning more about woodcock. Through the Woodcock Network which he founded in 2007, the well-known wildlife artist has ringed nearly 3,000 of the enigmatic waders, making extensive contributions to woodcock research along the way.   

Then we have a medley of individuals who may have started their careers in the conservation sector but have gone on to specialise in niche areas and so offer unique value of their own...  

Vidyanath Gururajan, for example, is a chartered mechanical engineer and co-inventor who sits on the boards of several agri-tech companies which create cutting-edge solutions to address challenges in the industry.   

The Field’s Alexandra Henton is an experienced editor and a trustee of the GWCT. And Dylan Williams – after creating the very first three-year National Diploma in Game, Wildlife and Conservation Management at Sparsholt College – now runs a consultancy through which he is connected to a range of brands and companies in the rural sector, having enjoyed 30 very successful years at the Royal Berkshire Shooting School.  

We have judges further north, in Scotland, too. Ross Ewing is director of moorland at Scottish Land & Estates, where he leads on moorland and wildlife management, and is no stranger to representing the interests of shooting and country sports in Scottish Parliament, having previously worked for the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC).  

Finally, closer to home is our very own executive director of Schöffel Country Marcus Janssen. Having grown up surrounded by very different habitats and wildlife in South Africa, where he worked in the safari and conservation industries, Marcus has a background in journalism and has been on the judging panel of the Purdey Awards for Game and Conservation since 2014.  

Eager to learn more about the judging panel? Click here. 

To nominate an individual or project, or submit an entry yourself before the 31 March deadline, please click here.