The Field interviews Jimmy Doherty

Jimmy Doherty, farmer, television presenter and rare-breeds champion tells Alec Marsh of his mission to bring Britain’s increasingly urbanised population back to nature

Asked to describe himself, Jimmy Doherty takes a big intake of breath. “I suppose I am a farmer, conservationist, TV presenter.” He gives a self-deprecating laugh that invites friendship. “Or maybe broadcaster sounds better?” Doherty, who is a youthful 50, first rose to prominence for his flyon- the-wall series in 2004 about becoming a rare-breeds pig farmer in Suffolk. Jimmy’s Farm was a hit on the BBC and ran for several seasons. He and old mate Jamie Oliver have also collaborated on many successful shows.

Rare breeds

Not long before that Doherty had been doing a PhD in entomology (insects, to you and me) when 9/11 happened. The way he tells it, he was counting flies when he realised it was time to throw it all in to become a farmer, one producing “quality meat with a story to tell – and rare breeds have a story”. He and his now wife Michaela started with a rented 100-acre farm outside Ipswich. Looking back, Doherty says it was “terrible land for growing anything… overrun, overgrown, bad land – ideal for pigs”. These were the livestock of choice because they required low investment but offered a rapid return. Doherty threw himself into the farmers’ market circuit before opening a farm shop of his own. Visitors, he discovered, liked to see the animals too, so quickly the ‘farm park’ dimension of the operation began to grow, soon becoming bigger than the actual agricultural aspect itself.

Twenty years on, Doherty and his wife have four daughters (aged between seven and 15) and their corner of Suffolk, now known as Jimmy’s Farm & Wildlife Park, has grown to 180 acres, employs 120 staff and draws an astonishing 300,000 visitors each year. As well as the rare-breed pigs they began with, the park now has a vast menagerie including four female polar bears, two European brown bears, a butterfly house, crocodiles, numerous goats and monkeys, and this summer some exciting new arrivals are also taking up residence here. Plus, there’s a host of native breeds, including Ixworth chickens. “It looks like we planned it,” Doherty says cheerfully. “We didn’t plan any of it out.”

Deer control

Tune into ITV on a Saturday morning and you’ll also find him on a cooking-type chat show – Jimmy & Shivi’s Farmhouse Breakfast, actually shot at his home in Suffolk and co-hosted with food writer and chef Shivi Ramoutar. Doherty also found time to host the VIP Enclosure at The Game Fair at Ragley Hall in July, and is positively evangelical about eating game. “We have a massive deer problem in this country but we have a delicious solution,” he declares. “It’s a wild harvest. Deer controlled in a very sustainable, measured and professional way is a great source of protein. Why wouldn’t you eat a beautiful venison steak, as opposed to some broiler chicken that’s been imported from Brazil?” Why not indeed.

Stalking and shooting

Doherty went stalking last year but says he struggles to find time for shooting these days, between the wildlife park, the presenting work and his family commitments. There’s the farm, too: his 45-strong herd of Suffolk pigs provides all the pork required for the restaurant, plus he also sells 10,000 free-range turkeys a year. In addition to this, he has five building projects under way, including the huge areas for the aforementioned newcomers. After a coffee, he takes me up to see the brown bears, one of which, Brunhilda, was rescued from Romania at the end of 2024 and is busy strolling around her bucolic compound. She is magnificent.

What’s his ambition? At first he thinks I’m asking how many visitors he’d like to attract – the answer, by the way, is about a million: the same as the nearby Colchester Zoo. But then he thinks again. “I’m a massive admirer of Tim Smit,” says Doherty, referencing the visionary who transformed a former china clay pit in Cornwall 25 years ago into a pioneering ecological attraction. “What he’s done with the Eden Project for plants has been remarkable. If we could do something even half as good as that for animals that would be a dream of mine.”

Conservation

Doherty’s vision is to build a family destination rooted in conservation and set in the centre of a working farm. “That’s paramount to me,” he declares. “Farming gets bashed as being the destroyer of the world but to have a conservation facility in the heart of a working farm demonstrates that nature and farming can go hand in hand.” This ethos is borne out in a new joint research project with Anglia Ruskin University on the British swallowtail butterfly and Doherty’s continuing work with The King’s Foundation.

However, he doesn’t want his centre to become an archetypal farm park: “You’ve got to be able to let kids run wild and go to the veg garden and pick the apples or build dens in the woods. So much of the natural world in the countryside is tempered: keep off the grass, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. There are rules and regulations here, but when we destroy those interfaces with nature, we lose that connection, not just in terms of respect for the natural world but also our food and where it comes from.”

So that, then, is Doherty’s purpose: to bring nature and our increasingly urbanised populations closer together; to help people to marvel and better understand nature’s sights, sounds, smells and, of course, its flavours. It’s quite a mission but also one that speaks to our times. And, as visitors to the VIP Enclosure at Ragley Hall probably understood, the game is on.