A CUMBRIAN farmer has been named as one of the UK’s top rural influencers.

Hannah Jackson, who is better known as The Red Shepherdess, because of her trademark red locks, moved from The Wirral to a farm at Croglin eight years ago and has racked up well over 90,000 followers by sharing her rural lifestyle online.

She says her mission is show young people that farming is a legitimate career choice, and has appeared on BBC’s Countryfile as well as writing her own book, Call Me Red, which is now a Sunday Times best seller. Hannah has more than 60,000 followers on Instagram and 30,000 on Twitter. On her farm she has 250 sheep, goats, a pony, pigs, chickens, ducks and dogs. Hannah has decided to pursue a career in farming after helping a sheep give birth on a family holiday.

A year of lockdowns led many Britons to crave agrarian escapes, with seed sales, rambling, and country property purchases all soaring in 2020. This has led Nofence (www.nofence.co.uk), the startup behind the world’s first virtual fencing technology for livestock, to curate a list of the UK’s top ten rural influencers. Nofence commissioned influencer marketing platform inzpire.me (www.inzpire.me) to analyse social media engagement and clout of the UK’s rural influencers, before Nofence’s experts developed the final list.