Dr John Godfrey with his certificate of appointment

In response, Mr Godfrey paid tribute to his brother and business partner Jim, his wife Phoebe, and to Grenville Welsh, chief executive of the British Pig Association before it became the National Pig Association.

The University of Lincoln was a successful, thriving and exciting university and would continue to build on this success, for instance with new engineering and agriculture schools, he said.

John Godfrey qualified as a chartered accountant in 1971 before returning to the family farming business now managed by him and his brother, Jim. The business, which has pig enterprises totalling 6,500 sows, farms land in an area that stretches from the Wash to north of the Humber. In 1998, he was awarded the CBE for services to agriculture.

He chaired the British Pig Association and negotiated the merging of the association's commercial pig industry representation with the NFU's pig industry representation to form, in 2000, the pig industry's single voice, the National Pig Association, of which he was the first chairman.

John Godfrey was also the key driver in creating English agriculture's first fully integrated farm assurance scheme, covering not only pig production on-farm but also feed, transport and processing.

He negotiated the English pig industry's classical swine fever welfare disposal scheme in 2002, which was a first in the United Kingdom. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Agricultural Societies in 2004 and in 2007 he was president of Lincolnshire Agricultural Society.

He is a past director of Scunthorpe United and its current president. He is a freeman of the City of London and a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Farmers. He will be High Sheriff of Lincolnshire in 2010.

He was appointed to the board of the University of Lincoln in 2002, having previously been on the board of Lincolnshire Agricultural College at Riseholme.