‘Farming is hungry work’: The Yorkshire Shepherdess on life with nine children

The Yorkshire Shepherdess was raised in suburban Huddersfield, not a sheep in sight. Amanda Owen was a romantic type who pored over pastoral images in library books – by chance, one image of some men at a cattle auction contained her future husband, Clive. She determined to head for the moors and, like some Thomas Hardy heroine, make her way in the windswept world of sheep farming. 

She is now the nation’s chief supplier of pastoral, today’s version of a rural-hymning poet, warbling the woodnotes wild. She is also an icon of motherhood, having produced no less than nine young farmhands. For many of us, Our Yorkshire Farm, the Channel 5 programme that mixes family and farming, was an ideal escape from the stresses of lockdown life. ‘Yeah, I suppose it’s an escape for lots of people’, she tells me over the phone, ‘but it’s also something achievable and on your doorstep – it’s a bit different from a programme about the Galapagos Islands.