Latest news with #ruralissues
RNZ News
2 days ago
- Health
- RNZ News
Calls for more rural mental health resourcing
health rural 5:18 pm today While farmers are treated to record dairy and meat prices, mental health is still a massive issue with disproportionately high suicide rates in rural areas. Huge work loads, isolation and lots of financial pressure can all take a toll. A $3 million funding boost for the Rural Support Trust has been a welcome announcement at Fieldays in Hamilton, but has now sparked calls for more clinical psychologists in rural areas. Alexa Cook reports.
RNZ News
2 days ago
- Health
- RNZ News
Mental health in the agricultural sector
health rural 19 minutes ago While farmers are treated to record dairy and meat prices, mental health is still a massive issue with disproportionately high suicide rates in rural areas. Huge work loads, isolation and lots of financial pressure can all take a toll. A $3 million funding boost for the Rural Support Trust has been a welcome announcement at Fieldays in Hamilton, but has now sparked calls for more clinical psychologists in rural areas. Alexa Cook reports.
Telegraph
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
A farmer's view of Clarkson's Farm: Bang on when it comes to loneliness, and the daft expense of tractors
As a fourth series of Clarkson's Farm hits screens, in the week a poll was published for Future Countryside showing that Jeremy Clarkson is over three times more respected on rural issues than Chris Packham among Gen Z viewers. Only Sir David Attenborough nudged ahead. So, outside the Downing Street bunker and a certain Oxfordshire planning department, Clarkson's Farm now has huge influence. Perhaps young people think the Amazon Prime series represents the countryside better than the BBC's Countryfile, maybe because the latter doesn't contain jokes about pig's clitorises. The latest series shows a tired and haggard looking Clarkson worn down by the endless bureaucracy, rubbish mobile reception and broken machinery, less ebullient and no longer bubbling over with the boyish enthusiasm of a new landowner – so a far more typical British farmer. Sooner or later we all reach the point in our farming careers when we feel, as Jeremy says, 'It turns out I'm not Jethro Tull, just a hapless f–kwit.' In my experience, this feeling is most acute when the staff take their holidays and one is left flying solo and discovers one hasn't a clue which knob to press on the tractor's hideously expensive and over-engineered dashboard. Watching Clarkson go through the same epiphany made me feel a little better about it. For the first time we get a sense of the loneliness of farming as – spoiler alert, but this has been widely trailed – farm manager Kaleb Cooper is not there for the first few episodes. Actually, it is even more lonely than portrayed, as most farmers would not have their land agent (if they are lucky enough to have one at all) appearing in the middle of the night to see how things are going, as 'Cheerful' Charlie Ireland does. I am lucky if I see mine once a year, and that is a big expense. Salvation comes in the form of Harriet from Derbyshire, seemingly an agency temp but one suspects there has been extensive auditioning for the role – Harriet is the ideal farmworker from central casting. A sassy youngster who puts her celebrity boss down straight away by revealing she hasn't watched a full episode of Clarkson's Farm, she is a terrific role model for the increasing number of girls coming into farming. And a great advert for the Tik-tok generation, multi-tasking as she flutters her luxuriant eyelashes at the video camera on her mobile while competently drilling the barley. In an industry where much of the work is done by a transient cast of young people, the value of a mentor like Clarkson is immense. It is touching to watch how he gives young people responsibility and boosts their confidence in their abilities by parading his own incompetence. Kaleb Cooper has benefitted from this to the extent that he is now on the celebrity circuit himself. And I suspect we haven't seen the last of Harriet Cowan. It seems strange in drought-ridden 2025 to be watching Clarkson and his team squelching through 2024 with hunched shoulders as the ceaseless rain falls on West Oxfordshire. The mood is one of grim resignation at Diddly Squat Farm. And in the first four episodes that I have watched so far, we haven't even been hit yet by the bombshell of a farmer-hating Labour government with its brutal taxation policy and one-sided trade deals. In this fourth series, the novelty factor has worn off and there are few new storylines, but we Clarkson fans are well attuned now to the running gags about the escaping stock, the disobedient gun-dogs and the incomprehensible Gerald. So, rather like listening to The Archers, there is a comfortable familiarity in sitting down to watch and immersing ourselves in the trials and tribulations of Farmer Clarkson. And throughout, there is a didactic tone that The Archers' agricultural story editor would be proud of, as we are made aware of the continual calculations to be made about the gestation period of pigs or the gross margin of various crops. For petrol-heads there are occasional jaunts into Top Gear -mode as Jezza looks to replace the 'Lambo' tractor and organises a beauty parade of gleaming behemoths in the yard, as only he could, and we watch Oxfordshire's finest machinery salesmen try to flog six-figure tractors, while, they themselves, struggle to know which knob to press on their ludicrously over-complicated machines. It is good that the programme has drawn attention to this aspect of the industry's plight. Arable farmers now have to have huge sums of money tied up in machinery, which gives the illusion of wealth, but in reality has the opposite effect. Every county has its Clarksons on the land; gentleman farmers who could do something more financially rewarding, or indeed, in some cases, nothing at all, but choose to immerse themselves in running a farm for the love of it and for the satisfaction of leaving their small patch of countryside in better shape than they found it. Often they have had a successful career first, before, one suspects, becoming the person they always wanted to be by going farming. But Clarkson and his ilk have been marked for extinction by the Chancellor and singled out for ritual abuse on social media by the leftists who accuse them of buying a farm to escape inheritance tax, as if the exemption from inheritance tax for farmers is some kind of peculiarly British loophole that doesn't also get applied to other businesses or indeed to farms in most parts of the world. This attitude ignores the good that someone like Clarkson can do by breathing life into the rural economy with a mixture of energetic entrepreneurship, risk-taking and sheer bloody mindedness – this series he undertakes a crusade to save rural pubs. Once again the nation's rustics can feel grateful that the UK's favourite farmer is standing up for them.
