THE farming community of south-west Scotland has lost one of its elder statesmen, with the death of Tom McCreath.

Thomas Crawford McCreath of Broughton Mains and Garlieston Home Farm died peacefully on October 31, at the age of 94 after a short illness.

Tom was born in 1929 at Broughton Mains farm where his grandfather and father had recently purchased the farm as the incumbent tenants. As a child, he missed a year at Whithorn Primary School due to Brucellosis. He studied at the Douglas Ewart High School and Fettes College during the War years and joined the Seaforth Highlanders in 1946. After officer training, he was stationed at Fort George and then Trieste in northern Italy as part of a peacekeeping force.

On returning home, Tom worked with his father at Broughton Mains and then bought the Home Farm of Galloway House in 1956.

In the same year, Tom was awarded a Nuffield Scholarship to study modern methods of agriculture in Australia and New Zealand. Having made his first silage with a horse and cart, on his return he became one of the early adopters of modern silage-making in clamps, with loose housing for dairy cows in cubicles and herringbone milking parlours.

As well as running the two dairies at Broughton Mains and Galloway House, where he was a noted breeder of Ayrshire cattle, Tom was an active committee member and local chairman of many local organisations. He was chair of the Scottish Milk Records Association and Grassland Society, an independent county and district councillor, a Justice of the Peace, a tax commissioner, and a deputy Lord Lieutenant for Wigtownshire.

In his later years, Tom became an authority on the agricultural history of southwest Scotland. His publications record the way in which Wigtownshire, with the highest proportion of tenancies in 1900, had become the area with the highest proportion of owner-occupied farms by 2000.

He regularly gave talks at Wigtown Book Festival and the U3A. He gave his last lecture on The Landed Estates of Wigtownshire to Newton Stewart Probus Club just six weeks ago.

He was married to Elaine Johnson for 57 years. They had four children - Ann, who runs Kikoromeo fashion house in Kenya, Rob, who farms in Australia, Alan (dec), and Michael who farms at Garlieston.

Tom is survived by three children, eight grandchildren: Jessie, Millie, Hanna, Iona, Archie, Harry, Kitty, and Louis and three great grandchildren: Cora, Aida, and Robin.