Amanda Owen, the father of their nine children, and our Yorkshire Farm’s Amanda Owen exclusively talk about her divorce, family, and finding someone special.
Amanda Owen, aka The Yorkshire Shepherdess, and her husband Clive, who first met in 1996 when 21-year-old Amanda visited Ravenseat Farm to collect a ram, spent more than a decade as a golden couple of the countryside. Viewers watched the parents of Nine Children, Raven, Reuben, Miles, Violet, Sidney, Annas, Clemmy, and Nancy while tending to their idyllic but demanding slice of stunning Yorkshire land as the stars of Channel 5’s wildly popular series Our Yorkshire Farm.
While the couple are now separated, they continue to farm and co-parent together, and, as a nation, we seem no less fascinated by their life. Amanda, who claims to be 51 but admits she’s “useless when it comes birthdays,” has a typically manic morning when we catch up to discuss her new children’s book Christmas Tales From The Farm.
The youngest children have gone back to school this week and the first hour of the day was filled with a flood of queries relating to missing school shoes and bus timetables, topping up quadbikes with oil and hunting for various lunch boxes.
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That said, Amanda still manages to looks like a woman in full control – even rather glamorous, with a dash of mascara and some pink lipstick. She laughs, “Oh, those are non-negotiables for me.” “I need five minutes every day to put on a bit of mascara and lip colour. I don’t feel like myself if I don’t finish dinner before dinner. It’s just who I am.
However, it’s a slippery slope. I always swore I’d never wear joggers, but the other day I did borrow a pair of Sidney’s jogging pants to throw over a pair of leggings. I’m okay with wearing things backward or with holes in them. I do have leggings at the moment with a hole in them… a cow tried to eat them. “
Amanda frequently offers fantastic, frequently hilarious tidbits about farm life. The family’s hat and scarf collection, she points out, is a little” crispy”, due to it spending months on the back of the range cooker.
She smiles, but it’s more about hiding what’s beneath. “I paint my nails, too. Oh, and I have a sore finger because I got it squashed by the skid steer when I was moving a log for the fire. “
She goes on to list the “big bruise” on her leg, which she claims was caused by an untrained sheep during shearing. So yes, I’ve got nice strong arms, but don’t look too closely because you’ll find I’ve got lumps taken out of them and bruises everywhere. “
Amanda has long shed the expectation that she should behave or dress like a” stereotypical “farmer’s wife – whatever that may look like, nowadays. She is determined that Ravenseat will remain a come-as-you-like safe space where there is “certainly no place for misogyny.” She wears her mascara and lippy wherever it is raining or shine, sheep or no sheep.
” I took a video call in the sheep pens the other day, which I can do now that we have WiFi in there, “she says”. Goodness me, you don’t like how you look when you work there, the person on the line said. At that point I had a sheep between my knees, because I was midway through shearing.
“Clemmy was also putting the sheep in a headlock, and she was ready to tip it up.” She was holding it with one hand, because technique is more than body strength. What was a prom dress with a big bow around the middle, not the festival wellies that last about three seconds on a farm, she had on properly wellies with steel-toes.
” It really doesn’t matter a hoot what you wear or look like, the proof is in the pudding. People will inquire if I’ve brought my sheepdog when I’m traveling. Why would I do that? I am free to present any evidence to anyone. You don’t expect a doctor to walk about with a stethoscope around their neck to prove they do their job, do you? The farming community can sniff out b******t at a thousand paces, and the saying goes, “all the gear and no idea.”
Amanda appears to be at a crossroads right now. The farming industry, she says, is facing a lot of uncertainty, with conversations around best use of our farmland and countryside, and ongoing debates about water quality, environmental impact, animal welfare and, of course, the consumer prices of our farmed goods.
She says the stresses these conversations can place on farmers are still hardly ever discussed. She can clearly remember the social devastation caused by the 2001 foot and mouth disease epidemic –which led to the culling of somewhere between 6.5 million and 10 million animals in the UK – and still worries about the future of her chosen career path.
The stress and strains of daily life are well known, and the resultant mental health is often the focus, but in cities are not. But there are just as many pressures, albeit different ones, in the countryside.
There was a significant gap between the rural countryside and the urban population in 2001, as I recall. What was happening was cataclysmic – like a Covid lockdown, but just for the country. I believe that people are unaware of the possibilities for farming. It isn’t always idyllic. Although this is a 24-hour, seven-day a week, 365-day-a-year job, I realize it’s a cliché.
With that in mind, she doesn’t expect “for one second” that all the children – who are aged between nine and 24 – will remain working at Ravenseat, which has been farmed for more than 1, 000 years. She sees it more as a springboard, giving them the tools to succeed wherever they choose.
There are many aspects of the Owens’ life that resemble those in a children’s book from a bygone era, despite the fact that it isn’t “always idyllic.”
“I’ll often think, where’s so and so kid? And they’ll have just left somewhere,” she smilely sighs. “They’ve got such a freedom. Although it sounds very Enid Blyton, they typically return from their expeditions complaining that something is wrong and that a dead sheep will be found at the bottom of a cliff.
” The other day one of them found an eyeball, then some helium balloons that someone had released with a photo and the name ‘ Steve ‘ on them. They sat there until their voices became murky, of course. Good, clean countryside fun! “
The funniest moments in the family are now included in Amanda’s most recent children’s book, Christmas Tales From the Farm. There’s the time they found an escaped reindeer in a field, and the three baby goats who like to munch on the kids ‘ homework and socks, as well as the family tradition of hosting their own Winter Olympics on the frozen land.
Amanda acknowledges that the finished product didn’t start off that way, despite being a delightfully illustrated collection of enjoyable stories.
” When I went to the publishers I had to say, ‘ I don’t have any sort of presentation because I’ve just been busy chasing a reindeer around the farm, ‘ which became one of the stories in the book. And I had a terrible time sticking to deadlines when writing it. It would reach the point of getting threats from the publisher before I’d turn in the work! I’d put my laptop to bed and write it down, and then I would wake up in the morning with it on my chest, hoping the battery would shut off before the laptop shut down.
“But it wasn’t ‘work’ as such, it was just a case of remembering some of the fun moments we’ve had and writing them down. Like the time someone left the doors open at night and we woke up to find a hedgehog running around downstairs… and the time we had to dig all the sheep out of the snow.”
And while Our Yorkshire Farm – the show that made Amanda and her family household names, pulling in more than 3 million viewers – ended in 2022, Amanda and her family are still on our screens renovating a ruined farmhouse with Channel 4 ’s Our Farm Next Door: Amanda, Clive And The Kids which has just been recommissioned for a further two series.
It came as a shock to many in 2022 when Amanda and Clive announced the end of their marriage – but not their working relationship or living arrangements. Amanda is still single despite dating both after splitting up. But she’s not lonely, and even though she and Clive still live at the same address, there are often, quite literally, acres between them.
She ponders, “I’m surrounded by people, and one of them is Clive, who I’m separated from, but sometimes it feels like I’m not.” “Like this morning, when I thought, ‘ Why are your socks on the floor? ‘
We’d probably have killed each other, with real character clashes and other things, if we had all lived together in a tiny space. But our ‘ home ‘ is pretty spacious, there are a lot of fields between us. There is plenty of room for you to lose yourself because it takes a whole day to walk the farm’s perimeter, she claims.
I feel like I’m living through my children because my house is so busy. With nine kids, my home is never empty – the people have multiplied and there’s often someone random asleep on the couch! Therefore, it would take a certain person to be able to handle the situation in terms of relationships. And my ex Clive still being an enormous part of my life. A sense of humor would be required as well!
Amanda’s” me time “is on her horse, she says. Her favorite ride-along experiences are those where she can sneak out and quietly ride alone. Finding time for date nights might also pose a problem. She says, “Watching people drown for three hours wasn’t my bag,” and Titanic (which came out in 1997) was the last movie she saw at a theater.
I don’t really lack love, in fact. If it happens, great, if it doesn’t, there’s plenty for me to be getting on with, isn’t there?! “
Amanda Owen’s Christmas Tales From the Farm is available now (Puffin, £14.99), visit www.waterstones.com. Amanda is on tour from 5 November to 7 December, seenothird. . uk/live-shows/amanda-owen
Source: Mirror
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