Amanda Owen 'f------ hated' farming and admits 'it wasn't what I imagined'

Despite being an icon of British farming – with innumerable books and TV shows featuring her engagingly chaotic family’s rural lifestyle - Amanda Owen came late to the country life.

Daughter of a mechanic and a model-turned-secretary, Amanda grew up in suburban Huddersfield. It was James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small that launched her dream of living on a farm. But her first forays into farming were not happy ones.

Amanda left school at 16 and her first job was milking cows on a West Yorkshire dairy farm: “I f***ing hated it,” she tells the Sunday Times. “It was not what I imagined at all. I smelt of effluent and silo, I was rubbish at it.”

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But Amanda was determined to stick at it – partly out of pride, she admits, because she had told so many people that she was going to love farming. And eventually she did, settling on a remote farm, Ravenseat Farm, in Swaledale with her husband Chris.

The pair divorced in 2022, after 22 years of marriage, but still live on the same property, with their nine kids floating between the main farmhouse and the holiday cottage next door.

Although farming was her first love, Amanda admits that her media career – she’s been featured in over half a dozen different TV shows as well as regularly hitting the best-seller lists – is where her main income comes in: “Waxing lyrical about sheep and showing pictures of sheep makes more money than actually doing anything with a sheep,” she says.

Amanda says she’s worried about changes in the law that might make it difficult for farmers without a thriving TV side-hustle to make ends meet: “The huge, great big farm businesses will have to find their way through it,” she says, but for ordinary tenant farmers, Amanda foresees “hard times” ahead.

Farming has been getting harder over recent decades, she says, with consumers expecting ever-cheaper food at the same time as politicians demand action on climate change: “Farmers are really, really good at implementing whatever is wanted of them, but it’s hard when you’re getting mixed messages.

“You’re supposed to be a food producer. You’re supposed to be the guardian of the land. You’re supposed to be battling climate change. You feel like whatever you do, there’s somebody saying, ‘No, you shouldn’t be doing it like that,’ and then the following week it’ll be something else.”

But Amanda herself seems to be thriving, despite having a busy farm, nine kids – eight of them still living at home – and an ex-husband who lives less than a minute’s walk away.

While she’s working hard to keep Ravenseat Farm afloat, she’s also looking forward to the next generation that will take on the family business.

She’s not sure which, if any, of her kids will actually decide to go into farming: “They’re all different characters,” she says. “Obviously one of them being a plasterer would be helpful. An electrician would be great. Plumber — brilliant.”