‘A Farmer’s Life for Me’ was filmed by the BBC in 2011, and has just started screening on ABC television from 6pm-7pm on Tuesday nights.
Filmed during midsummer in the beautiful rolling hills of Suffolk, ‘A Farmers Life for Me’ features 9 varied couples (siblings and married/partnered couples, gay/straight; of all ages & from all walks of life) competing for the ultimate prize – the right to run their own 25 acre Suffolk farm rent-free for a year. The eight episodes were screened in Britain late last year.
The competition is screened over eight episodes, and the judge is farmer Jimmy Doherty (childhood friend of chef Jamie Oliver), accompanied by his long-term business mentor. Jimmy Doherty has appeared in more than a dozen farming and food related television series, dating back to 2004. He’s also a book author, with two titles to his name; ‘A Farmer’s Life for Me’ (a guide to sustainable agriculture, as a hobby or business) and ‘A Taste of the country’ (a book of traditional country recipes).
Blunt and practical, Jimmy does a good job of explaining the reasons why things should be done in a particular fashion – and the attributes he’s looking for in the winners: thoughtful people with a plan and capable of carrying it out; who display passion and ability to work hard and as a team. And above all, couples who have business plans that have a realistic chance of success.
In the first episode, the 9 couples front up to the farm and choose which half-acre plot they’d like, out of the 9 spaces marked out. One couple dithers so long, they simply get their plot because it’s the only one left. Other couples rush in – and they ALL leave constructing their livestock-proof boundary fence until more than halfway through the 3 day initial trial (I’d have been in panic mode, especially if I’d never had anything to do with fencing before – like these couples.) Some finished just as the very clean & shiny Range Rover rolled up towing the fanciest horse float (horsebox) I’ve ever seen, containing the first delivery of sheep. Unsurprisingly, most contestants spent much of their 1200 pound budget on buying relatively easy to erect, electric fencing – plastic electric fencing poles, tape and a power unit. One couple purchased second hand posts and another bought ‘proper’ ‘livestock’ fencing – constructed with netting and treated pine posts. It was interesting seeing the poor devils banging each post (about 12cm across – not skinny little stakes) into the ground by hand (with a post hole driver). Particularly as every contestant seemed to spend the whole time in gumboots (‘wellington boots’), despite it being the middle of summer. The sweat just poured off them. Not a tractor-driven posthole digger in sight. Admittedly these timber posts came with a pointy end, and the soil was relatively loose and sandy…but as anyone knows who has tried to ram a skinny little beach umbrella stake into a sandy beach – you’ve still got to dig a hole, to get it to a secure depth. Curious to not see any star pickets, which would have been so much easier to handle and drive in by hand. Maybe they’re not commonly used in England, where fences are either temporary (and electric) or made to last hundreds of years (stone, hedges, solid timber). The self-described very competitive, sporty couple who built the ‘proper’ livestock fence unfortunately forgot about insulation – and had to improvise by tearing up plastic bags to reduce the power leaking out of the fence via the bare screws into the timber posts.
Along with the 1200 pound budget, each couple has 3 hours worth of use of the toy-sized tractor and plough. Some obsess over straight lines, others plough deep enough to lay pipes. Over the 3 days, each couple has to decide what sort of profit-making farming they’d like to do on their plot, as an example of how they’d run a larger farm. All come up with interesting ideas. Perhaps the most foreign concept to Australians, is one couple’s idea of ‘serviced allotments’. Serviced allotments are apparently planted out to veges and herbs, and customers pay for the right to come along and treat it as their own – picking whatever they want – without having to do any digging, planting, pruning, watering or weeding. In other words, they pay to get the fun end of the stick not the work end. Other contestants have plans for hog roasts (Wessex Saddleback pigs), mutton sausages (Texcel sheep), millinery wool hand died with natural vegetable dyes, such as beetroot (dreadlocked Wensleydale sheep), hay production and specialist salad greens.
There are also Gloucestershire old spot pigs, pedigree goats (organic, low fat goat meat), and wheat grown especially to make the pastry for goat meat pies. (Goat is the world’s most widely consumed meat.)
Curiously, no-one chooses cattle. It could have been because they need higher & more substantial fencing – however it wasn’t mentioned if this was a factor in anyone’s decision when choosing livestock. Perhaps the avoidance of cattle is because one of the very first tasks, done as a whole group, was piling up an estimate of the annual supply of grass (in bags) in front of pens of different animals. When told sheep and goats only eat around 15 bags of grass per year (in England, anyway) whereas one cow eats 100 bags, and of the perils of underestimating feed requirements, there was a group sigh of surprise. The 69 or so bags they piled up for the cow, wasn’t nearly enough. Lucky Jimmy Doherty didn’t add an estimate of what a single horse eats in one year, the contestants would have keeled over in shock.
The nine couples became eight, already. The first couple to go were siblings, dismissed because of their disagreements. Fairly stock-standard argy-bargy for siblings, but potentially problematic when running a business efficiently together. The couples are housed in very new and neat caravans, parked in a row across the paddock.
The classic quote from Jimmy Doherty is: ‘one of them said why do we keep doing all this business stuff? When are we going to do some actual farming?’, in a UK Telegraph newspaper interview. Jimmy keeps steering the contestants away from romantic fantasy land and back to reality.
Next week, ‘A Farmer’s Life for Me’ contestants have to demonstrate that they’re capable of producing saleable products from pork. Such as pork sausages. As anyone knows who has tackled sausage making – it’s one of those things that looks pretty easy but in fact has hilariously messy results in store for learners without the ‘knack’.
‘A farmers life for me’ should be screened on prime-time, not hidden away at 6pm when much of the population is either at work or travelling home, or dealing with family demands. It has all the hallmarks of the very best quality ‘reality’ television shows – by having an excellent judge in Jimmy Doherty, and sensible commentary (rather than overly dramatised, or romantic/idealistic). I look forward to seeing the whole series and encourage everyone who is interested in food, agriculture, the urban/rural divide, etc – to watch it also. The differences between farming in the UK and Australia are very interesting, but equally interesting are the similarities in public attitudes and farmer problems.
There’s some especially interesting forum comments in relation to a Guardian Newspaper article on ‘A Farmer Life for Me’, written by Brian Schofield. What strikes me is that many people in the U.K., just like in Australia, confuse ‘moving to the country’ with ‘moving onto a farm’ (as in a full-time self-supporting business). I’m puzzled about how someone can think they understand agriculture and farms, when in fact they’ve just moved from a large city to a small town. But they do – both here in Australia and in the U.K. And no doubt elsewhere. There are comments on the Guardian newspaper story from people who talk about ‘moving to the country’ then go on to mention that they’ve actually moved into a village – they’re not involved with agriculture in any way. And the classic comment on this forum? ‘Papers and milk are not delivered…Many rural spots are low on amenities and services, including one post box pickup and one bus a day!’ It is truly funny, at least for an Australian, because the writer of this comment clearly wasn’t joking. So many towns I could name, that would be delighted to have one bus a day, instead of only one every few days…
Tags: Living in the country and remote areas, Image of the bush, Australian outback TV and film