Training with fab farmers
14th February 2024
It’s been a joy this year to see my life come full circle. When I left the BBC in November 2023 lots of people kindly got in touch. One of them was Anna Jones: jonesthejourno.com She’s an author, journalist, producer, broadcaster and founder of an inspiring non-profit communications project called Just Farmers: justfarmers.org
Anna and I last saw each other 22 years ago, when she graduated. From 1999 to 2005 I taught radio journalism and production at the University of Lancashire in Preston, alongside my broadcasting work. She was one of my third year students. I remember well her final documentary about the impact of the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001. As well as being a memorable piece of radio, this was personal – her parents are farmers in the beautiful borderlands between Shropshire and Wales and had seen the devastation of that awful disease first hand.
After starting her career in newspapers, she’s worked on the BBC’s Countryfile and Farming Today, presented programmes for Radio 4, produced a new series with Matt Baker for Channel 4 about tenant farming and written a highly acclaimed and thought provoking book called Divide. It was inspired in part, as one reviewer put it, by “The gulf between the attitudes of her Welsh farming family and the hipsterish city of Bristol …”.
Fast forward then to 2024 and I’m up on my hind legs at the not-so hipsterish Phoenix Social Enterprise in Bristol, an urban environment much more familiar to me than to most of the farmers in the room (photo above by the brilliant Ant farwoodphotography.com)
For them it was a chance to meet a couple of journalists. For me it was a treat to be reunited with another member of the class of ’02. Callum May is now the producer for BBC Home Editor Mark Easton. And no, I hadn’t seen him for twenty plus years either! Anna and I agreed (very generously on her part) that the only thing that had changed about us was the colour of our hair. For any teacher, watching your students flourish is one of the delights of the job. To hear Anna, this diminutive dynamo, talking with such passion about helping farmers tell their stories, with knowledge and pride, was wonderful.
And for me this feels like a really valuable part of a new phase of my working life. I’m still teaching (I’m working at the University of Leeds this term with a new generation of would-be journalists) but also doing media skills and awareness training with charities and other organisations. It’s a great way to combine my belief in quality journalism and broadcasting and to dispel some myths about who journalists are and how they operate.
I also played snippets of chats with female farmers in West Yorkshire about rhubarb and rapeseed oil and showed off pictures of me with Basil Brush and Chris Kamara! Before the day was out I conducted interviews with farmers, younger and older, women and men, black and white from Scotland to Essex, urban Manchester to the Isle of Wight. We talked about growing speciality mushrooms for the restaurant trade, cattle egrets from Africa, activity trackers in cows’ ears and water pollution. The day – and one the following week with another group of farmers – was challenging, inspiring and really rather moving.
