Farmers and Festivals

• Documentary

Episode overview

Every year, hundreds of farms across the UK diversify their income by opening their gates and hosting music festivals. Anita Rani heads to Somerset to meet sheep farmers Andy and Jen, and their sons, as they prepare to transform Fernhill Farm for an annual festival - something this farming family have been doing for 18 years. Anita helps festival organiser Kev make use of wool from the farm’s sheep to build giant sofas for the revellers, and later joins Andy and Jen’s 18-year-old son Kyle as he helps out in the farm café kitchen, where a mutton curry is being prepared for hundreds of campers. Back out in the fields, Anita visits the farm’s remarkable waste water cleaning system – a series of lakes which produce water so pure that it’s an official Ark habitat for endangered white claw crayfish. She also dips into the Countryfile archive to explore rural music, revisiting an outdoor violin performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Lark Ascending.

52 minutes