Amid a youth mental health crisis fuelled partly by technology, young people are finding meaning in gritty analogue jobs – including mucking out pigs
Crusty cow pats crunch underfoot as red kites soar above and a sign warns ‘beware of the bull’. The twittering birds, the country air, the ancient oaks sprouting from Somerset’s rolling hills – they wash away the white noise of modern life, calm my nervous system.
That’s the idea of Jamie’s Farm, based on the outskirts of Bath in England. Redefining regenerative agriculture, it nurtures both the planet while producing food, and people – specifically young people who are experiencing mental health challenges.
Blending farming with therapy in a homely setting, the farm-cum-charity immerses young people in agricultural life, entrusting them with gritty jobs that some people would have us believe ‘the snowflake generation’ are not cut out for. Nonsense, says the farm’s co-founder, psychotherapist Tish Feilden.
“Children want to be hardworking,” she says, showing me around with a slight limp after a sheep broke her leg. “They want to be kind, they want to be helpful, they want to be good at things, and they want to feel good about themselves. But I think that too many children feel like a failure: a failure at school, a failure at home … a failure because they don’t know what they want to do, or who they want to be.”
Jamie’s Farm seeks to address that, instilling a sense of purpose and agency in young people through meaningful work. Participants are referred by their schools, often in response to behavioural challenges. Many arrive addicted to smartphones and sugar, some have mental health diagnoses, likely their local youth club has closed down (two-thirds of council-run facilities in England have since 2010), or their swimming pool (500 gone in England since 2010), and they ask the most innocent but heartbreaking questions like: “Is it OK if I run down this field?”
Some say nothing: they are mute. But not for long. After a few days mucking out pigs, feeding chickens, picking veg, herding cows, digging holes, swimming in streams and eating healthy meals around a communal table, where they’re invited to share how they feel, they finally speak. Sometimes it’s the first time that their teachers have heard them talk.
“Teachers often say: ‘I just don’t recognise this child’,”says Feilden, as wasps buzz around a nearby fig tree. “These children who have never shown up or revealed themselves suddenly seem to want to collectively manifest the good in themselves.”
It’s not, she says, rocket science. “You have to work with the positives in a child, give them a sense of purpose and belonging, give them real jobs with real outcomes and a reflective space where they get to talk about how they feel.”
The English curriculum, with its focus on academic results and core subjects, does not foster this kind of environment, she says. Little wonder, perhaps, that the number of children receiving special needs support has risen sharply – up 44% since 2016, according to government data. Or that a record 170,000 children in England missed at least half their school lessons last year.
School isn’t working, says Feilden, but she’s hopeful nonetheless. “Although the system feels tough and the world for kids is as tough as I have ever known it, I think the wind of change is here,” she adds. “There are more people saying: ‘This isn’t working’.”
Feilden, who runs the farm’s therapeutic programme, launched the charity two decades ago with her son Jamie, a farmer and former teacher who “was bright and practically engaged” as a kid, but not suited to sitting still. Since then, the charity has supported more than 17,000 young people at its farm in Bath and five other farms, which it has opened since in England and Wales.
These children who have never shown up or revealed themselves suddenly seem to want to collectively manifest the good in themselves
Data suggests that its approach is working: 70% of participants reported improvements in mental wellbeing, 69% showed improved behaviour at school, and 64% of those with “concerning” attendance were no longer a concern six months after working on the farm.
For Adele Newell from Nuneaton, who “was constantly being told off, constantly being sent out of lessons”, visiting Jamie’s Farm changed her perspective. “I was really negative towards everything, I would keep myself to myself, I would sit in my bedroom and not talk to anyone,” she says. “Now I’m a lot more willing to try things, a lot more open.”
Newell went on to work as an apprentice at Jamie’s Farm in Lewes, using her lived experience to inspire others. The charity’s success is, perhaps, more striking given that participants spend just five days on its farms.“
People ask: ‘How can it happen in five days?’ The answer is because it’s immersive, and it touches every aspect of the child’s mind, body and spirit, and it gives them hope. It gives them optimism, and it gives them a new value of themselves,”says Feilden. Even for young people who make it through school, the outlook is daunting. The rise of AI makes the task of finding meaningful, fulfilling careers harder than ever. Meanwhile, even many entry-level roles require experience.
According to the Office for National Statistics, some 987,000 16–24-year-olds are not in work, education or training – an 11-year high. “It’s a bit of a nightmare,” says Molly King, a graduate marine biologist living in Newquay.
I first met King aboard a sailboat in St Katharine Docks, London, where she was completing a maritime training programme through the Sea Ranger Service. The Dutch-based social enterprise teaches young people from predominantly deprived coastal regions to sail and become ocean conservationists, all while paying them a salary.
No experience or qualifications are necessary, but would-be participants must rise to the challenge of a bootcamp run by Navy veterans. Those who cut the mustard learn the ropes in the gruelling Celtic Sea, where they get on-the-job training in sailing, navigation, maintenance and conservation, including seagrass restoration.
This is something I never thought I’d be confident enough to achieve
“I’m dyslexic and things sit in my brain easier if I’m hands-on doing stuff,” says King, who says her experience has since helped her land a temporary conservation role with the Scottish Wildlife Trust. “Being hands-on, seeing what the problem is, and trying to fix it; problem solving for yourself – I think that’s the only way a lot of young people can learn.”
For Cariad Margetson, the Sea Ranger Service was a life raft for her in industrial Port Talbot, Wales, where the shrinking steel sector has swelled jobless figures. “I was struggling to find work and felt stuck like many other young people in the area,” she says. “[As a sea ranger], I have gained valuable skills and unexpectedly progressed to a senior role. This is something I never thought I’d be confident enough to achieve.”
While jobs are in short supply in some sectors, there’s a nationwide shortage of tradespeople. However, many schools, pupils say, don’t prepare young people to enter such careers, which is why the Construction Youth Trust [CYT] exists.
Working with industry partners, the London-based social mobility charity connects young people with employers and job opportunities in construction. Among the almost 14,000 participants that it supported last year was Dominic Jastak, 18, from Woolwich, London, who didn’t lack the work ethic, but was short on the connections and confidence to apply for jobs and attend interviews.
“In school, we have careers advisors but we don’t really have anyone to properly guide us towards jobs and make the right connections for us,” says Jastak, who’s since been offered a degree apprenticeship in project management with Turner and Townsend in the City of London. “[CYT] mentors showed me all these pathways and it opened up a new world. They taught me how to make a good impression … how to use professional language and think with a business mindset. We [young people] need more things like this, things they don’t teach in school.”
Back on the farm near Bath, Feilden reflects on society’s skewed perception of young people. “The desire in teenagers to be kind, to be caring, to be productive, to be effective and have some sense of agency is so underestimated,” she says. “They want to feel they have something to give – and that can be such an easy thing to create.
Main image: Jamie’s Farm
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