‘We were in trouble’ Countryfile’s Adam Henson feared losing his home after devastating ordeal at beloved farm

COUNTRYFILE star Adam Henson has opened up about almost losing his home and family farm during the 2001 Foot and Mouth epidemic which had a devastating impact on the agricultural industry. 

Adam, 58, lives on the 1,600-acre Bemborough Farm with his wife Charlie and their two children Alfie and Ella. He took over the running of the farm from his dad Joe in 1998, working hard to grow crops such as wheat, spring barley and oilseed rape, alongside managing its commercial ewes.

He told The Countrywoman’s Guide that he experienced a particularly difficult time on the Gloucestershire farm in the early 2000s when Foot and Mouth disease spread rapidly throughout the U.K.

More than 2,000 cases of the disease arose during the epidemic which affected both sheep and cows, but more than six million of these animals were killed in order to halt the spread of the disease.

Adam and Charlie feared they would lose their home as a result of the devastating losses.

“For us, Foot and Mouth was a really hard time,” he recalled.

“We were tenants of the farm and we were heavily invested in Cotswold Farm Park, as we’d borrowed a lot of money, on top of our heavy overdraft, to push forward the business forward,” Adam explained.

It was only about a year after Adam and his business partner, Duncan, had borrowed the money that the devastating epidemic hit.

Adam says the outbreak left his business in a desperate state: “it was horrible, and we were in trouble,” he says.

“The farm closed, the bank was closing in on us, as was our landlord.

“We sat around the kitchen table with our wives – all our assets were tied up in the farm, if we lost the business, we lost our houses and our livelihoods.”

Having inherited the tenancy of the farm from his dad, Adam was heartbroken to face bankruptcy and the potential end of his family’s legacy. 

The two saving graces were a small insurance policy that the partners had put in place and, by an incredible stroke of good luck, the offer of a job on Countryfile.

Thankfully, Adam’s job on Countryfile was enough to keep the farm afloat – but throughout his career Adam has been very transparent about the fact it’s taken multiple streams of income to keep his family legacy going. 

He has done his best to make the public aware that most farms are now having to diversify just to survive.

Alongside running Bemborough Farm and working on Countryfile, the BBC star also runs Cotswold Farm Park, a popular visitor attraction offering glamping, lamb feeding, and animal rides, which was founded by Joe in 1971. 

Speaking on his mental health podcast, Keeping on Track, last year, Adam admitted that he’s often “struggled to make ends meet” on the farm and that he wouldn’t be able to keep it going without these “other income streams.”

However, when the Covid pandemic hit and the government enforced a national lockdown, Adam feared it would be a repeat of the 2001 epidemic. 

“I thought that was it!” he admitted to The Countrywoman’s Guide. 

“I found myself doing a video on social media saying, ‘I promised my dad on his deathbed, I’d look after his legacy and we’re going to lose the lot.’ That was my genuine emotion at the time.”

But because he and Duncan had managed to weather the storm of Foot and Mouth, they were able to deal with the stress of the Covid pandemic. The farming partners took advantage of the furlough scheme, and initiatives which allowed the farm to thrive once again.

Adam hopes that by speaking out the highs and lows of farming he’ll be able to educate people about the nature of the agricultural industry. “I would love, if I could, to get agriculture, land use and conservation back into education.

“One of my soapboxes is that we learn about history and religion, but we don’t learn about land use and where our food comes from,” he concluded.