Obituary - John Phillips, farmer, biologist and founder of The Heather Trust

Died: December 2, 2016

JOHN Phillips, who has died aged 82, was a farmer, biologist and writer who sought to reconcile the various uses to which uplands are put in Scotland.

He was prompted to do this because in the late 1960s and 70s, the long-held concept of integrated land use was breaking down. Decisions on land potential and use were being made on an either/or basis fuelled by high levels of agricultural and forestry grants and subsidies. This was having a disastrous effect on biodiversity, landscape and shooting. John Phillips devoted the next 40 years to doing something about it.

John Douglas Parnham Phillips was born in Largs, Ayrshire, the fourth child and only son of Douglas Phillips, shipbuilder, and Sheila Wilkinson, his second wife. Home was on his half-sister's estate which was a well established sheep walk where such game as there was had to be worked for with diligence and field craft. By the time the Second World War ended in 1945, the young John's school holidays were dominated by country sports and "helping" the tenant farmer to carry out seasonal farm work.

He was educated at Harrow where he spent almost all his recreational time on the school farm. He did a gap year on the Cally Estate in Galloway before studying agriculture at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Spells as a cattleman and hill shepherd and then as a farm manager in Perthshir, followed before he bought a small sandy farm in Fife with the inheritance he received when his father died in 1958. Under capitalised from the start, that came to an end in 1964 and at the first Scottish Game Fair at Blair Drummond in July that year he was head hunted by the Eley Game Advisory Station (EGAS) at Fordingbridge to train as their field advisor in Scotland - a post he took up in 1968.

EGAS was the undisputed expert body on matters to do with low ground game. In 1957, the Scottish Landowners' Federation had instigated a grouse research programme with Aberdeen University which was located in Glenesk in Angus and later at Banchory where the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE) took it on and funded a specialist upland unit.

In the early 1970s, moor owners in parts of Scotland, notably the Spey and Findhorn valleys and central Perthshire, were experiencing catastrophic declines in grouse caused allegedly by sheep ticks. With initial funding coming from Slater Walker Securities and many other landowners, sufficient money was forthcoming to start research into the problem. This led to a fruitful link between a now self-employed Phillips, the ITE grouse unit and the Moredun Veterinary Research Institute in Edinburgh. It resulted in the publication of two definitive scientific papers on tick-borne disease in 1978.

Research into grazing effects on heather attracted further support, notably in 1989 from the Joseph Nickerson Heather Improvement Foundation. This led to the formation of The Heather Trust in 1994 and to substantial contracts with public and private bodies during the subsequent decade.

The prime motivation of the trust was always to encourage best practice and it became the brand leader in the provision of advice on heather conservation. Phillips's Moorland Management - for Agriculture, Conservation and Field Sports, was published in 2012.

A keen fisher, a useful shot, competent gardener and enthusiast of English setters, flatcoats and Lakeland terriers, he married first Diane Stratton (divorced 1981), with whom he had two sons. He married second Jennifer Braasch, who died in 2008. He is survived by his companion Claire Rackham.