Anna Jones
Anna is a rural affairs journalist, author, broadcaster, and television producer.
Session: Farming and the Media – stories and voices
Strand: Partnerships
Where: M Shed, Bristol / Hybrid – streamed online
When: 13:00 – 13:45, Tuesday 14th November 2023
Anna Jones is a rural affairs journalist, author, broadcaster, and television producer. She’s also a Nuffield Farming Scholar and a farmer’s daughter from the Welsh Borders.
Anna is a freelance Producer/Director on high profile programmes including BBC One’s Countryfile and the upcoming Channel 4 series Our Dream Farm with Matt Baker. She is a familiar voice on Radio 4’s Farming Today and On Your Farm and has reported on agricultural issues for BBC News and the World Service. She has written articles for The Guardian, Countryfile Magazine, Farmers Guardian and Farmers Weekly and even did a spell in Ambridge as Agricultural Advisor on The Archers.
Anna’s career took an unexpected turn after doing a Nuffield Farming Scholarship in 2016/17, which looked at how the media portrays farming and country life to the public. She travelled the world and discovered a deep disconnect between the metropolitan mainstream media and a distrustful and defensive farming industry. It made Anna determined to motivate farmers to step up and share their stories. She left a staff job at the BBC in 2018 to set up her communications project Just Farmers, aimed at connecting journalists and programme makers with independent, authentic voices at the grassroots of farming. Anna’s mission to improve the national conversation around rural issues, agriculture and the environment inspired her first book Divide: The relationship crisis between town and country, published by Kyle Books in 2022.