8:50am Thursday 4th February 2010
After a two-year absence from our screens, Monty Don returns to Channel 4 with My Dream Farm. The programme follows Monty Don as he helps six different families to realise their dream of returning to the land. They’re all determined to leave the rat race behind and transform their lives, but with few skills and no previous experience, it’s going to be far from easy.
With over forty years of involvement in farming, Monty Don is on hand to guide our novices through their first, tentative steps. Filmed throughout the farming year, the series is a celebration of rural skills and crafts and will help inform and inspire viewers about raising animals and producing their own food at home.
Tonight’s episode features stressed executive Karon Roberts and her partner Simon Sanders, who have given up the rat race to rear rare breed pigs in Suffolk. Simon inherited a 13 acre site from his farmer grandfather, and after years of travelling the world, he wants to give something back to the village he grew up in.
The couple have grand plans and expect to spend nearly £1 million transforming their derelict land with pigs, vegetables and an enormous barn housing a farm shop, café and art gallery. It is not farming as Monty Don knows it, but he is keen to help as these first-time farmers charge headfirst into a scheme many landowners would think foolhardily ambitious.
Monty quickly realises that the urban outsiders’ plan relies on the goodwill of local residents and helps the couple to make their farm a visitor-friendly hub of activity. But the whole scheme is threatened when some of the pigs fall ill with a devastating agricultural disease.
My Dream Farm 4th February, 8pm on Channel 4
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.smallholder.co.uk