Christopher Jones has had a long and distinguished career helping other rural dwellers, not least through the formation of the Farming Community Network. Sara Gregson went to meet him.
There are some people who go through life continually giving, and Christopher Jones is one of them, even at the grand age of 80. It is clear that faith, kindness and the community are at the heart of all he does, especially when it came to founding one of the sector's leading charities, the Farming Community Network.
But he has led quite a life. Christopher has lived and farmed at the 90-hectare (222-acre) Manor Farm at West Haddon, Northamptonshire, for more than 70 years, after moving there with his parents in 1948. He studied agriculture at university in Oxford, where he met his future wife, Ita, a nurse at Radcliffe Infirmary.
A man of deep Christian faith, Christopher and Ita spent their first 10 years of married life in Nigeria working for the Church Anglican Missionary Agency, working with small farmers and co-operatives, and their time there coincided with the Nigerian-Biafran civil war.
Christopher says: "It was a big learning experience being in someone else's civil war. Trying to take things forward when it was over was a challenge. A friend described my role as ‘responsible for everything and in charge of nothing'.
"But it made me understand that planning what might happen in the future is just as important as trying to work out the best things to do in the present."
Setting up
On their return to England in 1978, Christopher and Ita found themselves to be in similar predicament, as Christopher's father had no succession plan in place.
He says: "In the 1950s and 1960s, this size of mixed farm could financially accommodate an incoming and outgoing generation, but that is not true anymore. We sold the main farmhouse to clear a large overdraft and converted the old tractor shed into a much better house to live in."
Half of Manor Farm is now down to wheat and oilseed rape and managed by a share farmer. The other half is grassland, with a flock of 100 Mule and Charollais cross ewes and 20 suckler cows. The animals have been looked after by livestock manager, Sovra Warden, for the past 10 years, and they eat nothing but grass and conserved pasture with all the progeny taken through to be finished. Christopher and Ita used to sell their meat from the farm gate, but nowadays most of the beef and a proportion of the lamb is sold through local butchers.
Some smaller buildings have been turned into workshops to let, as well housing the national Farming Community Network office, a charity which has been of great service to the rural community and down to Christopher, who has an innate desire to help others. The final decades of the 20th century saw a steep decline in the fortunes of some British farmers and a sharp rise in the numbers of suicides. Christopher, along with a small group, set up the Farming Crisis Network after inspirational visits to Germany, the USA and Europe.
He says: "Origins matter; they determine the method and the mindset, which form the tradition, so they need to be remembered. The vision and method came from a farmers' Christian initiative in Germany and the Gloucestershire Farming Friends service in this country. The goading to ‘get organised before something happens' came from the US and the first real finance arose from the efforts of a Dutch member of the European Parliament. The final divine touch was the emergence of a group of remarkable volunteers with insight, farming knowledge and empathy."
Help
Farming Community Network is a voluntary organisation and charity set up to offer pastoral and practical support to farmers and their families with personal or business-related problems. It was set up as a joint venture between the Agricultural Christian Fellowship and Germinate: the Arthur Rank Centre in 1995.
When the foot-and-mouth outbreak hit the UK in 2001, the service was ready to respond, setting up a dedicated telephone helpline. Farming Community Network, of which Prince Charles is a patron, was initially run from Christopher's spare bedroom at Manor Farm and the network of volunteers grew in demand for rising calls for help. Volunteers are usually farmers who are on hand to provide a sympathetic ear to anyone who needs to talk and are there to ‘walk with' anyone in the farming community, guiding them to appropriate professionals who can help them rather than give direct advice. Christopher stepped down from the day-to-day running of Farming Crisis Network in 2007 and was awarded an MBE for services to agriculture in 2011. The number of volunteers and callers to the Farming Crisis Network helpline increased every year since then, and in 2013 it changed its name to the Farming Community Network.
Christopher says: "The critical thing for volunteers is to be good listeners, sticking alongside people with deep worries.
"I can see great troubles ahead for many smaller farmers - with things such as Brexit and climate change all making things harder. Farming has been pushed to the edge of consciousness of politicians and the public. This is because their guiding lights have been competition in all things. These are presented as the ultimate realities to which farmers must adapt. But the ultimate realities farming must adapt to are land, soil, climate and weather, animals and plants, health and disease and relations with both people and the natural world.
"I would like to be remembered for working for justice within the farming world, not just for its own sake, but because it is God's way. Our faith has been there in everything Ita and I have done over the past decades."
Each year about 6,000 people benefit from the work of Farming Community Network. Four hundred trained volunteers, mainly farmers, operate in 30 volunteer groups across England and Wales. As well as a national telephone helpline, the volunteers also provide a visiting service to those who need further support.
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A communal resource
Farming Community Network is part of Farming Help - a collaboration between five unique charities offering assistance in times of need - and the three issues that people contact Farming Community Network about most are mental well-being, finances and family relationships.
Jude McCann, Farming Community Network chief executive, says: "Farmers have tended to cope well during the Covid-19 pandemic; they are a resilient bunch. There were increased calls during lockdown from people affected by losing markets and income and problems looking after animals when staff were isolating. And of course there have been bereavements. "In the future, we are trying to encourage farmers to plan positively for the future with our FarmWell online initiative (farmwell.org.uk), which aims to keep farmers resilient through changing times.
"We are also about to publish a children's book about a family dog called Sir Port, which we hope might help parents with any troubles as they read it to their children. Christopher's strong vision for the charity and his hard work and dedication over the years has helped thousands of families."
