Anna Jones is a woman on a mission. 

She believes that unless we learn to accept and respect our social, cultural and political differences as town and country people, we are never going to solve the chronic problems in our food system and environment. 

In this, the first of two sessions chaired by Fieldwork Bookclub’s Adam Bedford, Anna explores why only farmers – who manage two thirds of the UK’s landscape – working together with conservation groups can create a healthier food system and bring back nature in diverse abundance. But for this to happen, we need to overcome the urban/rural disconnect, learning to work together to heal the land.

Anna Jones is a well-known journalist, broadcaster, blogger and Nuffield Farming Scholar. She is a familiar voice on BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today, On Your Farm, Costing the Earth, Food Programme and BBC World Service, and a freelance producer/director on BBC One’s Countryfile. She writes for the Guardian and farming trade press. Growing up on the Welsh Borders, from at least five generations of farmers on her father’s side and a long line of butchers and farm labourers on her mother’s, Anna’s heritage is deeply rooted in working class, conservative, rural values.

Adam Bedford has studied and worked in and around agriculture for the past 20 years. In his day job he represents and advises farmers, and in his spare time runs the ‘Fieldwork Book Club,’ an online book club with 500 subscribers across the world reading books on food, farming and the natural world, and interviews different authors every month. Adam lives rurally near York with his family.