For a Love of the Land

Farming formed a huge part of my life growing up.  My grandparents were tenant farmers in Hampshire, a farm my Uncle now works.  My father was a land agent.  As a child, much of my life was rooted in the farming world.

But for most of my adulthood I lived and worked in cities: at university and thereafter when I became a barrister.  Then, when I was writing my first book, our circumstances changed. Without really expecting, or particularly wanting to, I moved with my husband, son and baby, out of London and to the edge of a field in Suffolk.  Over the following years we took on the running of his small family farm: replanting hedgerows, re-establishing rights of way, experimenting with different grazing techniques and converting 200 acres of conventional arable to organic.

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I found the farmers around me in a very different place to the one my grandfather had been in when he was alive, known and respected for growing the nation's food.  When we moved back to London a few years later I was struck by how wide the gap in understanding between city and country seemed to have grown.

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For a Love of the Land is my attempt to tell the human side of farming.  As with my previous book, In Your Defence, it seeks to shine a light on some of the people in farming that those in the city rarely get to hear from.  Through telling their stories I hope to show the human cost of modern farming, as well as casting a light on a quiet revolution happening in farms all over the country alongside some of the biggest legal, climate and political changes to farming in two generations.  Around the farmers' stories I weave my own: how I moved to the countryside for a break from 'real life' and ended up finding it instead.

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Picture: wild oats being hand rogued by seasonal workers on my grandparents' farm