I posted on your site back in May because I put you on my blog Farm Blogs from Around the World (www.farmblogs.blogspot.com)

The reason I am writing to you from deepest France is because I wanted to give you an update on Farm Blogs (which is completely and entirely non-commercial) and which has gone from strength to strength with amazing speed.

I am trying to gather in one place the very best of global blogging about farms, farming and rural life. It’s a hobby really that follows my global interest in farming. As my wife is Australian and trying to keep up the Aussie in our three kids from deep rural France, I am keen to get some more good Australian farm blogs on to my blog.

You can find the blog roll, sorted by country - you’re naturally under Australia (and there is a General Interest section).

My posts are made up of the blog recommendations from farm bloggers and I also post regular stories about world farming.

All blogs have been recommended to me by other bloggers or identified by me during my occassional browsing.

I have a pretty broad definition of farming - if you’re producing food, you’re a farmer, to my mind at least.

So blogs range from ranches to part-time smallholders, and resources for them.

Once recommended, I add them to the blogroll and then contact the bloggers (just as I am contacting you), asking them to send me a few words about their farm/small-holding and their blog and, critically, to recommend their favourite farm/farming blogs (just as Joan recommended you).

And so it goes and grows.

So, I added you to my blog roll but I am trying to provide a little more info besides each link - namely location; acreage; stock and crops raised).

I would very much appreciate it if you could please consider:

a) writing to me with a brief description of your blog and holding (at a minimum location; acreage; stock and crops in order to help people find like minded souls) along with permission for a once off only use of a couple of photos from your blog, so that I can make a posting about you;

b) writing to me with your favourite farming/rural blogs recommendations; particularly Australian ones;

c) add a link on your blog, if that’s possible, to www.farmblogs.blogspot.com; and if you can find a moment even make a posting about www.farmblogs.blogspot.com and how this blog is growing organically accross the world from other farming bloggers.

d) please feel free to send me the odd photo, both now and on an on-going basis (people who do this write to me about once a month, with a brief para of text and up to 5 photos - again it helps drive traffic to them). The blog tries to pick up different seasonal activities in different parts of the world at different times, so any photos would be much appreciated - they also help drive traffic to your site.

I know this is a drag but a lot of people are finding that my blog is driving a lot of traffic to them, so I hope you can find a moment to drop me a line. Very much hoping to hear from you,

With kind regards,

Ian

www.farmblogs.blogspot.com

being from a farm myself I can really appreciate your blog…

Just letting you know that I have stumbled across a brand new website - http://www.efarming.com.au/ that looks really good.

Its got everything from news to weather to shopping, and hubby will love the weather section - you can see the fronts coming through from South Africa!

Doing a little browsing on farm blogs, I came accross yours and greatly enjoyed it.

I thought you might be interested in a blog I run, called www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com Under the first photo post of every day are articles from the International Herald Tribune concerning agriculture, food, and water.

I’m also the author of a book called ‘A Place in My Country: In Search of a Rural Dream’ which might also interest you too. (For some reviews, please see below.) http://www.amazon.co.uk/Place-My-Country-Search-Rural/dp/0753823888/ref=pd_sbs_b_title_14

Good luck with your venture,
Kind regards,
Ian

www.ianwalthew.com
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com

PRAISE FOR A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY

(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, hardcover July 2007; Phoenix paperback May 1, 2008)

‘Stressed city couple seeks slower life in Cotswolds idyll’. The premise is so familiar there’s even a predictably technical term for it: ‘downshifting’. Yet it’s hard to think in those terms about A Place in My Country, given the care with which Ian Walthew has skirted all the sprung traps of nostalgia and sentiment. A thoughtful observer and magpie-ish collector of oral history, Walthew has a sharp sense of the absurdities and the assets of his native land, reinforced by years living overseas. In his country life, escaped cows and the hunt ball jostle for space with barn raves and hawkish property developers. Avoiding the usual bland elegy for the rustic and redemptive, his book is a valuable memoir, both personal and social, a meditation on belonging in one of many Englands.’

The Observer

‘I have been reading about the British countryside all my life but this is the first post-modern take on a national asset so routinely taken for granted. Author Ian Walthew takes a 12-inch plough to the cosy complacency that so many apply to the subject and reveals that 21st century rural life is not a place for the genteel - in a corner of Gloucestershire most commonly viewed by outsiders from their 4×4s as they hurry to overpriced weekend retreats, he finds a farming heartbeat that is proud and defiant, defended by a cast of characters that outshine The Archers. A revelation of a book.’

Tim Butcher

Author of Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart

(Galaxy Book of the Year 2008, 3rd Prize Winner)

‘Far from being an idealistic paen to the English countryside, the book becomes a hard-edged and moving account of life rural Britain today.’

Sunday Times

‘a poignant portrait of country life….the book could have been a rollicking, laugh-a-minute riff on ignorant townies having to ask what exactly a heifer is. There are certainly some fine comic episodes.. but it quickly turns into something more sombre - and more interesting…His beautifully written book is an elegy for an England that is dying, or at least in terminal decline.’

Daily Telegraph

‘When stressed out media exec Ian Walthew panic buys a Cotswold cottage as an escape route from the urban treadmill, he unwittingly acquires a window on a corner of rural Britain at work and at play, and his writer’s eye sees just what’s going on. Walthew has a genuine gift for bringing both people and places to life and marshals his runaway real life narratives with a novelist’s skill. The story of his surprising friendship with his neighbour Norman - who is trying to keep his ramshackle farm and his dignity together with a few strands of baler twine, while his millionaire neighbours embrace the prairie concept of modern industrial farming - is compelling and often deeply moving. And Walthew’s own struggle with age-old issues of identity, friendship, community and a place to call home are fresh, sympathetic and never trying. It’s not the sort of book you’d pick up expecting a page-turner, but that’s exactly what it turn’s out to be.’

Hugh-Fearnley Whittingstall

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.

What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’

Financial Times

‘Having lived and worked abroad as a director of the International Herald Tribune for most of his adult life, Walthew, along with his Australian wife, Han, made a snap decision, aged 34, to buy a house in Gloucestershire, and embrace life in the country.

This is familiar territory, but Walthew combines his own story - coming to terms with the untimely deaths of his father and brother - with that of the land and the people who make up village life.

Funny, touching and ultimately very moving, this is a beautiful, unsentimental account of a personal loss that is reflected in the rapidly changing texture of life in rural England.’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Even peripheral characters…really come to life; as does the beauty of the Cotswolds and the harsh realities it conceals. A Place in My Country is an edifying consideration of the English countryside, its rich history and its attempt to adapt in today’s world’

Times Literary Supplement

In our case my wife was good enough to be the primary parent and put up with four years of poverty while I did a business degree.

Our journey has included moving house 8 times moving State twice.

During this adventure we have made many new friends and have discovered which of the old ones - were friends after-all. Our view of the world is deeper and our lives richer for the experience and we have come to understand we were not defined by the boundaries of the farm or for that matter any particular current endeavor. While there have been tears before bedtime for all at times we do not look back with regret and welcome the opportunity each new sunrise brings.

With the move from the farm only six weeks old no doubt your pain is still raw – I hope you quickly come to the realization that when you start from a low base things do not have to improve much and it feels like the tide is turning and indeed can get better very quickly.

Good luck.