Amanda Owen opens up about her family’s rise to fame and their future during podcast appearance

Amanda Owen better known as The Yorkshire Shepherdess, sat down with the famous poet and playwright for an episode of his podcast The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed.

The mother-of-nine, who tends to a remote 2,000 acre farm in North Yorkshire, said her family’s “strange diversification” began with an appearance in an ITV documentary called The Dales.

The 46-year-old also said Our Yorkshire Farm, which has become Channel 5's most-watched show since it launched in 2018, has kept her “incredibly busy”.

During the podcast interview, she said: “We were just a small part of that, that was really I suppose the beginning of doing other things.

“But with the emphasis being on farming and diversification, it’s a diversification, just like you might have a farm shop or a campsite or whatever.

“Maybe it’s a bit of a strange diversification but if you can make a living out of writing about sheep, and taking photographs of sheep, as well as wrestling them to the ground and shearing them, then all well and good.

“Anybody who wishes to say: ‘Well you’re not a shepherd anymore because you’ve got a pair of stilettos on and a body-con dress’, I will say: ‘Oh yes I am’, because it’s still all about the farm and all about the sheep at the end of the day.”

When she was asked about her family’s future on Ravenseat Farm and whether her children want to become farmers, she said: “I don’t look that far ahead”.

She added: “I say to the children they can be whatever they want to be and go wherever they want to go.

“Of course they go through stages where they’re more enthusiastic about the countryside, as they get older into their teens, obviously they want to go away.

“Raven (her eldest child) when she went to York, she was heading to the bright lights, couldn’t wait to get to a place where her phone worked and she could order a takeaway without it being cold and stuck to the paper – it’s all brilliant.

“But you know within a month or two I’m getting text messages asking how to make Yorkshire pudding tins out of bean cans and can you prove a loaf of bread on a radiator when you haven’t got on open fire.

“So it’s instilled into you the kind of life you lead in the countryside.”

You can listen to that episode of The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed on BBC Sounds.