Countryfile's Adam Henson and wife's 'horrible' ordeal left them fearful of losing home

Farming can be a precarious business at best, and Countryfile’s Adam Henson clearly recalls the moment he and wife Charlie thought they’d lost everything.

He told The Countrywoman’s Guide how the Foot and Mouth epidemic – which was estimated to have cost Britain £8 billion in 2001 – came close to spelling the end of his family farm.

“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.”

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

There were more than 2,000 cases across the UK, and more than six million sheep and cattle were killed in order to halt the spread of the disease.

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.”

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.

Adam’s family has two strong traditions – farming, which was his dad’s life, and show business. In Countryfile he seems to have combined the two.

The BBC presenter’s grandfather was the actor Lesley Henson, who is remembered for founding ENSA during the Second World War, and his uncle Nicky Henson had a long career in film and TV – appearing in everything from EastEnders to Fawlty Towers.

Adam’s dad Joe has a unique legacy in the world of agriculture. He was a staunch advocate for preserving rare breed livestock, and from that stemmed his idea to open Cotswold Farm Park to visitors in 1971.

Without his tireless work, we would probably have lost Gloucester cattle (which gives the milk that produces double Gloucester cheese) and the Gloucester Old Spot pig.

It was against that background that Adam had faced potential bankruptcy – and the loss of his dad’s lifelong dream. When the government announced a national lockdown to stem the spread of Covid, Adam thought the nightmare had begun again: “On the Monday the government closed the country down and I thought that was it!

“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 well-placed to deal with the stress of the Covid pandemic. They took advantage of the furlough scheme, and initiatives such as the controversial Eat Out To Help Out, and the farm is once again thriving.

For Adam’s part, he hopes that his own legacy will be in education: “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.”