I’m Izzy Clay, aged 17, and I’ve been farming with my dad all my life. For the first seven years of my life, I grew up in the village next to the farm and it was my granny and granddad who had our family farm. Sadly, my grandad passed away in 2013 so we moved up here and my dad’s been running it ever since. I’ve done it with him – growing up in the mud – you know, helping out. It’s just a way of life, I’ve not known any different.

Like Young Farmers, we have the whole community. It’s completely different to anything else you can experience. I’m so lucky to have been brought up in the countryside. You step outside and there’s that fresh air, there’s the greenery and there’s our life style. It’s absolutely beautiful. I couldn’t imagine another way to grow up. The things that you learn and that you see – you get an entirely different perspective.

I personally want to be a midwife when I grow up, and I only want to do that because I enjoy lambing time. I just enjoy the births and being part of something that means something, not just being in an office nine to five. It’s being outside, being in the real world. Having that experience, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

I grew up on my parent’s farm, at top of hill just over there in Denholme. It’s a stock rearing farm, cattle and sheep, 0ccasionally pigs and hens and what have you.

As a child you’d work on the farm and you didn’t have a lot of choice really. All of us kids mucked in and did what there was to do. It was a good childhood, a good way to be brought up.

Farming is definitely a way of life. To start with, you don’t sign on at nine o’clock and knock off at five, it can be twenty four hours a day at times depending on the time of year and what type of farm you live on. If you’re born into it, you grow up with it, and it’s just how it is. I still farm, just the other side of Oxenhope – cattle and sheep, that’s what we do, stock rearing.

Bradford’s a lot bigger than what people think it is. A lot of people just think of inner city Bradford, but Bradford’s extremely diverse. It’s huge and it covers a massive area. Like where we’re stood right now, on the edge of Denholme village, you can see into the distance for many a mile, right across to Bingley and Ilkley. I like being up on top of a hill, where there’s nobody else about, it’s peaceful. We’re extremely lucky to live in the country side that we do live in, it’s fabulous! The views are spectacular, and people that live around here are, generally, decent folk.

We’re in Denholme, and we’re here today to clip some sheep. These are my uncle’s sheep, we’re all busy just helping out. We’ve got people wrapping up the wool, worming the sheep, and obviously clipping as well.

We’re all family and friends, like Rueben and Sam who we’ve met through Young Farmers and who live over the hill from us. That’s the way it is with farming, every man and his dog comes out to help – no matter the time, everyone’s always ready to help. It’s just like a big community.

People don’t realise the amount of work that gets put into farming. We live to work, but we do it because we enjoy it. There’s some hard aspects as well, but there’s good and bad with everything, you have to look at the positives. If I wasn’t doing this I’d just be sat at home, but I’m out doing stuff and that’s what I enjoy most about it, being with everyone else and getting stuff done.

I’m Walter Clay, a farmer for my sins, and here we are, shearing sheep. We farm between Denholme and Oxenhope. The farm stretches between both villages really, and takes in Oxenhope Moor – which is a big, rough lump of ground. A lot of rough grazing, and down near the villages we have some better grazing land.

I’m the fourth generation of the family, it was my dad’s grandmother who came to our farm in 1900.

We’re only ten minutes from Bradford, but we’re on the edge of some really big open expanses of land. We have no land under a thousand feet, so because we’re high up, we have a very short summer and come autumn our lambs need to be off this farm. So, we sell them at auction to lower farms and they fatten them up through the winter. So although those low farms may be producing a lot of your food, they’re intrinsically linked to our high farms. That’s where the stock comes from.

Farming can be a lonely industry. On a nice day, when things are going right then everything’s good, but it can be very isolating as a farmer. Who does a farmer turn to? Winters can be relentless. This year people complained that it’s not been warm, but what does that mean to lots of folk? It means they can’t have their barbecues, but weather to a farmer is the make or break of a business. Your whole calendar has to revolve around the weather.

It would be nice to have a finishing time, but it doesn’t work like that. In lambing time, I was averaging about two hours sleep a night for a good couple of weeks. Sometimes just falling asleep at the kitchen table, and on a good night I might make it to the sofa for three hours, if the dog hadn’t got there before me. But that’s it, it’s those key windows that make a lot of profit for the year.

I know a lot of businesses and industries like to employ farmers’ kids, because they don’t know what a finishing time is. A job is done when it’s done, and they tend not to witter and complain. And that’s what we’re seeing here today. If younger end want to work then they need to be encouraged.