‘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.<\/p>\n
Filmed during midsummer in the beautiful rolling hills of Suffolk,\u00a0‘A Farmers Life for Me’ \u00a0features 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.\u00a0 The eight episodes were screened in Britain late last year.<\/p>\n
The competition is screened over eight episodes, and the judge is\u00a0farmer Jimmy Doherty<\/a>\u00a0(childhood friend of chef Jamie Oliver),\u00a0accompanied by his long-term\u00a0business mentor.\u00a0 Jimmy\u00a0Doherty has\u00a0appeared in more than a dozen<\/a>\u00a0farming and food related television series, dating back to 2004.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n 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:\u00a0 thoughtful\u00a0people with a plan and capable of carrying it out; who display passion and ability to work hard and as a team. \u00a0And above all, couples who have\u00a0business plans that have a realistic chance of success.<\/p>\n In the first episode, the 9 couples front up to the farm and choose\u00a0which half-acre\u00a0plot they’d like, out of the 9 spaces marked out.\u00a0\u00a0 One couple dithers so long, they simply get their plot because it’s the only one left.\u00a0 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.)\u00a0\u00a0 Some finished just as the\u00a0very clean & shiny Range Rover rolled up towing the fanciest horse float (horsebox) I’ve ever seen, containing the first delivery of sheep.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0One couple purchased second hand posts and another bought ‘proper’\u00a0‘livestock’ fencing – constructed with netting\u00a0and treated pine posts.\u00a0 It was interesting seeing the poor devils\u00a0banging each\u00a0post (about 12cm across – not skinny little stakes) \u00a0into the ground by hand (with a post hole driver).\u00a0 Particularly as every contestant seemed to spend the whole time in gumboots (‘wellington boots’), despite it being the middle of summer.\u00a0 The sweat just poured off them.\u00a0 Not a tractor-driven posthole digger in sight.\u00a0 Admittedly these timber posts came with a pointy end, and the soil was relatively loose and sandy…but as anyone knows who has\u00a0tried to ram a skinny little beach umbrella stake into a sandy beach – you’ve still got to dig a hole, to get\u00a0it to a secure depth.\u00a0 Curious to not see any star pickets, which would have been so much easier to handle and drive in by hand.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Along with the 1200 pound budget, each couple has 3 hours worth of use of the toy-sized tractor and plough.\u00a0 Some obsess over straight lines, others plough deep enough to lay pipes.\u00a0 Over the 3 days,\u00a0each 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.\u00a0\u00a0 All come up with interesting ideas.\u00a0 Perhaps the most foreign concept to Australians, is one couple’s idea of ‘serviced allotments’.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 In other words, they pay to get the fun end of the stick not the work end. \u00a0Other contestants\u00a0have plans for hog roasts (Wessex Saddleback pigs), mutton sausages (Texcel sheep<\/a>), millinery wool hand died with natural vegetable dyes, such as beetroot (dreadlocked Wensleydale sheep<\/a>), hay production and specialist salad greens.<\/p>\n There are also Gloucestershire\u00a0old spot pigs<\/a>, pedigree goats (organic, low fat goat meat), and wheat grown especially to make the pastry for goat meat pies.\u00a0 (Goat is the world’s most widely consumed meat.)<\/p>\n Curiously, no-one chooses cattle.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Perhaps\u00a0the avoidance of cattle\u00a0is because one of the very first tasks, done as a whole group,\u00a0was piling up an estimate of the annual supply of grass (in bags) in front of pens of different animals.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The 69 or so bags they piled up for the cow, wasn’t nearly enough.\u00a0 Lucky Jimmy Doherty didn’t add an estimate of what a single horse eats in one year, the contestants would\u00a0have keeled over in shock.<\/p>\n The nine couples became eight, already.\u00a0 The first couple to go were siblings, dismissed\u00a0because of their disagreements.\u00a0 Fairly stock-standard argy-bargy for siblings, but potentially problematic when running a business efficiently together.\u00a0 The couples are housed in very new and neat caravans, parked in a row across the paddock.<\/p>\n The classic quote from Jimmy Doherty is:\u00a0 ‘one of them said why do we keep doing all this business stuff?\u00a0 When are we going to do some actual farming?’, in a UK Telegraph newspaper<\/a> interview.\u00a0 Jimmy keeps steering the contestants away from romantic fantasy land and back to reality.<\/p>\n Next week, ‘A Farmer’s Life for Me’ contestants have to demonstrate that they’re capable of producing saleable products from pork.\u00a0 Such as pork sausages.\u00a0 As anyone knows who has tackled\u00a0sausage 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’.<\/p>\n ‘A farmers life for me’\u00a0should 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.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 I look forward to seeing\u00a0the whole series and encourage everyone who is interested in food, agriculture, the urban\/rural divide, etc – \u00a0to\u00a0watch it\u00a0also.\u00a0 The differences between farming in the UK\u00a0and Australia are very interesting, but equally interesting are the similarities in public attitudes and farmer problems.<\/p>\n