Springtime On The Farm and Helen Skelton’s vital mission - Sarah Todd

The former Blue Peter presenter is well-placed to comment – she grew up on a farm but now lives a much more urban life on the edge of a city. She’s seen both sides and made her views known while promoting the new series of Springtime On The Farm.

The Channel 5 programme, which gets under way at 8pm on Easter Monday, was scheduled to be broadcast live from a farm in Yorkshire but, like so much else, has had to make changes because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The show, which is returning for its third series, has carried on without a single person in the production team having to leave their homes; Helen recording footage from her Yorkshire garden on her iPhone while co-presenter Adam Henson is doing the same from his Cotswold farm.

Skelton hopes the programme will encourage greater respect for farming, saying that at the moment “there’s a massive disconnect between food producers and the rest of the country”.

She says it’s not only her farming background that makes her believe this, but her experiences of living in France.

“It’s very different there,” she says. “You go to the market and you ask the farmer there what you should get, and he tells you and you buy it because that’s what’s best at that time of year.

“We don’t do that over here. Like if we went into a supermarket and the guy behind the counter said, ‘You should eat this’, we’d tell them to mind their own business. I think that’s a shame.”

It’s a subject that Prince Charles has been talking about for many years, believing the majority of people have “lost any real connection with the land”.

The Prince of Wales has also made comparisons with attitudes elsewhere in the world.

“Unlike in most parts of the continent of Europe, many people in the UK are now four or more generations removed from anyone who actually worked on the land – and it frequently shows in their attitudes,” he wrote in a piece for Country Life magazine.

“They have only a vague understanding of what farming is or does; and, as outsiders looking in, they are increasingly suspicious of it.”

Sadly, because of coronavirus, there are plenty of people with time on their hands. There is no doubt that a proportion of these people will come out the other end of this crisis with a greater interest in both the food they eat and the outdoors.

If nothing else, they may find the time that they otherwise wouldn’t have done to watch programmes like Springtime On The Farm.

This writer has a new-found interest in Gardeners’ World, there’s something soothing amid such uncertain times about watching Monty Don pottering around.

The farming community needs to grasp the nettle and use this opportunity to stop the disconnection that Prince Charles and Helen Skelton have spoken about.

With new-born lambs frolicking in the fields, blossom on the trees and the apparent clearing of rivers and streams as pollution levels drop, there has never been a better time to start this conversation. There has certainly been a general realisation that our world had gone too far down the road of relying on global food supply chains.

News of Polish beef imports flooding the market at this time of crisis have been widely criticised. Many shoppers have apparently shunned shelves of the cut-price meat in Sainsbury’s and Asda and voiced their disapproval, vowing to buy British.

It must be a different story though for struggling families, maybe cooped up during lockdown in high-rise flats without any garden space, to think about anything else but where the next meal is coming from. Worrying where food comes from is a luxury some can’t afford.

Education of the next generation of shoppers must be a good starting point. There were queues outside the supermarkets because of this awful illness and social distancing, but we also need to tell children that it was because we had started to rely too heavily on imported goods.

The farming message has sometimes been too simple. Calls to ‘Buy British’ or ‘Support British Farmers’ have maybe gone over people’s heads. Why should they? But these slogans make much more sense now; the general public can relate to them now they have seen empty shelves and appreciated what good service local butchers and smaller shops can provide.

This terrible time should be a springboard to fight the “disconnect”. Spring has well and truly sprung and the one certainty in these uncertain times is that the seasons will come and go. Before we know where we are it will be summer, then autumn and winter. Slowly, like an Easter chick emerging from its egg or a daffodil blowing in the breeze, our world will recover. It’s up to us to wake up and smell the roses, or whatever else Mother Nature gifts us, and not step blindly back on the conveyor belt that distances so many from farming.

Sarah Todd is a former editor of Yorkshire Life magazine.

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