Thomas Lecky

Lecky was born on 31 December 1904, the twelfth of 13 children, and raised on a small farm in Swift River, in the Blue Mountains region in Portland Parish in the island of Jamaica.[1][2] Lecky received a scholarship to attend the Jamaica School of Agriculture at Hope Farm in Saint Andrew Parish. As a child, Lecky saw his father lose his banana crop as a result of hurricanes three years in a row. This inspired Lecky to research solutions to provide a improve the diet of his community and neighbours by developing the local breed cattle for milk and beef.[1][3]

At the Jamaica School of Agriculture the director of the government stock farm H.H. Cousins involved Lecky in testing European cattle breeds for their suitability yto the Jamaican environment. Lecky went on to study agriculture and animal husbandry at McGill University and Ontario Agricultural College in Canada. At university he focused on researching acclimatising European breeds to Jamaica's environment. He concluded that the answer was not an acclimatised European breed but a new breed, a completely adapted tropical breed.[1]

On returning to Jamaica in 1935 Lecky started to research his ideas by using lines of cattle and began to select bulls for breeding from the best producing cows in Jamaica.[1]

In 1949, Lecky gathered his documentation and travelled to the University of Edinburgh where he used this research as the basis for his doctorate. His dissertation, entitled "Genetic Improvement in Diary Cattle in the Tropics" presented his ideas for developing a tropical dairy breed and catapulted him to international acclaim.[1][3]

Lecky wrote in his autobiography, Cattle and I, that as someone with black blood, he struggled to gain acceptance in scientific circles in the Colony of Jamaica, where key positions were given to white people, such as Cousins. It was only when the British West Indian labour unrest of 1934-1939 took place, and the subsequent nationalist movement took hold in the 1940s, that he was finally appointed to a position of authority, that of breeding cattle at Hope Farm.[4]

In 1925, after graduating, Lecky worked for the government at Hope, where he assessed the new breeds of cattle being introduced to Jamaica and tested their reaction to local conditions. Lecky learned that the cattle in Jamaica at that time were not well suited to life on hillsides where many small farmers had holdings. He believed that all small farmers should have cattle because besides producing milk, every year a young animal could be sold to help pay for school fees.[1]

Lecky decided that what Jamaica needed was an animal that would produce enough milk for farmers as well as be light enough that they would move up and down steep hillsides. Cousins had advocated the use of cross-breeding, but when Lecky was appointed head of Hope Farm in 1942, he instead employed the practice of line breeding. He bred the Jamaica Hope, Red, and Black cattle breeds, adapted for the local climate.[1][5][6][7]

The Jamaica Hope was a combination of the British Jersey cow with the Holstein and the Indian Sahiwal breed, and could produce up to an average of 12 litres of milk a day, three times that produced by other cattle on the island. Lecky's work revolutionized the Jamaican dairy industry, and scientists flocked to Jamaica to see his work. In 1952, Lecky had the Jamaica Hope registered and recognised. Lecky's work impacted on the development of cattle in many tropical countries.[1][8]

1959 - Officer of the Order of the British Empire, for meritorious and devoted service to agriculture.

1970 - Norman Manley Award for Excellence, first ever recipient of the award.

1978 - Order of Merit, for service to the dairy and cattle industries of Jamaica.[9]

• Lecky, T.P. 1962. "The development of the Jamaica Hope as a tropical adopted dairy breed". U.N. Conference on the Application of Science and Technology for the benefit of the less developed areas. Agenda Item C. 5.2, 18 p.
• Lecky, T.P. 1996. Cattle and I: an autobiography (Kingston: Ian Randle).