Graham Harvey

Land Trust Trustee

After graduating in agriculture at Bangor - followed by a spell of post-graduate research - he joined Farmers Weekly as a reporter and feature writer. He has since written on food and farming for a wide range of publications including The Sunday Times, Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, New Scientist, and Country Life. For three years he wrote the Old Muckspreader column in Private Eye.

In the mid-1980s he joined the script-writing team of the long-running radio series The Archers, since when he has written more than 600 episodes. He is currently the programme’s Agricultural Advisor, responsible for developing the farming and rural storylines. For TV he has written episodes of The Bill and of the space series Jupiter Moon. He has also written a number of stage plays, mostly on rural themes. They include The Shearing Gang, the story of young people from a rural community in crisis, and The Darkness of the Sun, about the West Country writer Henry Williamson

His first book, The Killing of the Countryside, was published to critical acclaim in 1997, and was winner of the BP Natural World Book Prize. This was followed by The Forgiveness of Nature, a study of the part grassland has played in the life and culture of Britain. At its publication in 2000 it was the Daily Mail’s Book of the Week. We Want Real Food was published in 2006 and serialised in both the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. His most recent book – Grass Fed Nation – is published in 2016. He is also co-founder of the country’s leading conference on ecological agriculture – the Oxford Real Farming Conference.