Tom Pemberton'No flat caps': The young farmers bucking stereotypes
The cast of The Fast and the Farmer-ish on common misconceptions, manual labour and the work that goes into your pint of milk.
When Tom Pemberton was 15 he started working on his family’s farm. “If I'm truly honest, I wasn't really into it,” he says, with a laugh. Now, aged 29, he couldn’t feel more differently.
“I'm so passionate about farming,” Tom, from Lytham in Lancashire, says. “Every day you get to see the results of what you did yesterday, a month ago, a year ago. I am the biggest advocate for farming. It's the best job ever.”
Farming changed his life, he adds. He’s grown an audience of more than 500,000 followers on YouTube and TikTok - where he reveals the truth about life on a farm - and he hosts BBC competition series The Fast and the Farmer-ish.
Tom loves being able to show people the realities of the job because there are lots of misconceptions around farming, he says. The stereotype used to be “male, with a flat cap and a grey-haired dog by his side,” he says, “but now a farmer can be anyone.”
With its young cast, The Fast and the Farmer-ish - a series which challenges farmers to the ultimate tractor-driving contest - pushes back on this narrow idea of farmers, and what a farmer looks like. Contestants are a mix of genders and their hometowns are across the UK.
Tom PembertonYoung people are “vital for our industry”, says Jude McCann, head of The Farming Community Network, a voluntary group that supports farmers. Young farmers are helping the industry focus on things like climate change, biodiversity and food security, he adds.
“I think young farmers are definitely needed in the world,” says Tom Pemberton. “If we didn't have any young farmers, we'd have no farms.”
'Farmers definitely aren't heartless'
Becky Dornan, a 25-year-old farmer from Lanark in Scotland, says one of the most hurtful misconceptions she runs into is the idea that farmers like her don’t care about the animals they raise or have a connection to them.
“It can be a heartbreaking job at times, especially when you see that animals have been injured,” she says. “And I think people would assume we're heartless towards things like that, but we’re definitely not.”
Becky, a contestant on The Fast and the Farmer-ish series two, says she sometimes surprises people when she drives past them in her large SUV.
“A lot of people assume I won’t be able to drive what I’m driving,” she says. “But I think women can do everything that the guys can do.”
Despite the surprised reactions, she believes, on the whole, farming has become much more inclusive. “I think things have definitely gotten a lot easier, and people are more accepting of girls in the industry.”
BBC‘Farming is a hard job’
Tom Pemberton thinks most people don’t fully appreciate the care and thought that goes with being a farmer.
“You see a pint of milk on the shelves, but there's so much that goes into that pint of milk,” he says.
“Farmers have to be a midwife [to the cows], they’ve got to be a doctor, they’ve got to be everything: a gardener, a botanist just to make sure the milk lands on the shelves every day,” he says.
But the industry’s efficiency means people rarely consider where their produce comes from, he says.
Tom Ablitt, another contestant on the new series, agrees. “I think it would be good for people to realise where their produce came from.”
The 21-year-old farmer based in Pembrokeshire, Wales, adds that he’s not sure people realise just how demanding farming can be. “It's a hard job,” he says.
BBCAn average day for him means waking up at 4am and finishing around 8pm. And he rarely gets time off, because caring for the animals and crops is a never-ending job.
But, still, he loves his job, which makes the intense workload not only bearable, but genuinely fun.
“Working in the countryside with animals, and doing something different every day is quite appealing to me.”
Although he says he wouldn’t rule out an office job in the future, for now, he’s very happy on the farm.
