John Craven says the early days of Countryfile were hard going because the team struggled to get cameras onto farms and persuade farmers to speak. He says that has changed, with farmers now more willing to open the gate and talk about their work.
The remarks matter because Craven, 85, has been at the centre of rural broadcasting for decades. He has presented Countryfile for 37 years, after launching Newsround on the in 1972 and later spending a 17-year stint on the children's programme.
In a recent interview with Farmers' Guardian, Craven said it took a long time to win farmers over. What slowed things down was not just access to land, but the basic trust needed to let a television crew in and speak plainly about life on a working farm. That reluctance, he suggested, has eased over time as farmers have become more open about sharing what they do and why they do it.
Craven, who lives in a village near Banbury with his wife and brought up two daughters, linked that change to a bigger national debate. He said the country faces a hard balance between environmental concern and the need to produce more food, and argued that the amount of food grown in this country needs to rise. That puts his long view of farming television in step with a live political and practical argument about what British farming is for now.
He was speaking as he attended Farm Fest in Warwickshire and gave a talk on farmers, which put him in front of the same world he has covered for years. The shift he described is striking: a programme that once had to coax its way through farm gates now works in a climate where farmers are more ready to explain themselves. What remains unsettled is the balance he named, because the more open conversation becomes, the clearer the demand grows for a farming system that can feed more people without abandoning environmental concerns.
For Craven, that is the real story behind the memories. The access problem is no longer the main obstacle; the argument over how much food the country should produce is.
