Dev Farm —– my story.
I enrolled for a BA in Development studies in 1979, and was quickly introduced to the farm as an open-air laboratory where students were being encouraged to develop skills and projects relevant to and appropriate for natural resource management in the third world. DEV farm and the opportunity it presented was a huge draw for me, and for my fellow student Bett Barrett. Animal traction was being considered in DEV at that point – David Gibbon, Jean Paul Jeanrenaud and David Barton, were planning a project to design and test animal-drawn equipment … Bett and I didn’t hesitate and the rest of our DEV student careers centred on the farm and that project, which supplied the subject of our joint dissertation, “Draught Animal Power, Past or Future? A study of draught animal power, with particular emphasis on nutrition and the calculation of animal energy, and an alternative agricultural strategy for the UK” A touch ambitious and idealistic – perhaps!
DEV acquired Gunder and Frank, two Hereford x Friesian bullocks, and we set to the task of training them. There is film, somewhere, showing us, and hapless members of our families roped (literally) in to help, being towed at speed around the farm – they were powerful beasts even at a young age. But before too long all that power was miraculously bent to the purpose and they became (mostly) calm and biddable in harness to the serious business of our attempts to develop and study animal draught technology.
There followed an amazing 3 years in Dev and on the farm, Bett and I spent many hours cultivating and measuring with Gunder and Frank, reviewing literature on draught animal power and, with the help of a dynamometer and a system proposed by the Centre for Tropical Veterinary Medicine in Edinburgh, devising calculations for optimum feeding rations for working animals. It was interesting and we were of course Dev-style idealistic – promoting appropriate technology was big in the theories of the time and we enthusiastically worked to further the cause.
It was also huge fun. We went to the Royal Agricultural Show in Warwickshire to demonstrate ‘Technology for Progress’, much to the amusement of the Queen and her retinue who stopped by to have a look. We were a marked contrast to the acres of heavy agricultural machinery surrounding us at that show but later we took part in demos at a Gressenhall Rural Life Museum open day, where we appeared to fit in well with the theme of The Women’s Land Army, and with their own magnificent working Suffolk Punch horses. By my final year the farm had moved across the road, and acquired a pair of cob draught horses, Boxer and Joe, another team for us to work the farm with and providing potential for more draught animal power student dissertations.
The DEV draught animal group provided a set of 5 DEV Discussion Papers, including one based on our dissertation titled ‘Nutrition and Working Efficiency of Draught Bovines on a Norfolk Smallholding”. I stayed on in DEV for a while working as RA to David Gibbon on the production of ‘Animal Draught Technology – An annotated bibliography’ which was jointly published by DEV/ODG and The Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG).
After just a year elsewhere I returned to DEV and worked in a series of administrative and management roles based in ODG until 2016, so essentially I spent 37 years of my life in the School. I have a lot to thank the farm for!
Jane Sargent (nee Bartlett)
Norwich
10.03.23
(591 words)
