Seven years ago, she gained fame by appearing on the Channel 5 show Our Yorkshire Farm with her husband Clive, 69, and their nine children, portraying the idyllic rural life.
During the pandemic, the show’s viewership soared as people were enthralled by Amanda Owen’s farming life, witnessing her caring for lambs, facing the challenges of nature, raising nine children, and managing to look effortlessly beautiful throughout it all.
Amanda Owen met Clive in 1996 when he was previously married with two children. At 21 years old, she joined his farm as a trainee shepherdess. Despite the significant age gap, they fell in love and went on to have nine children together. Their life on the farm has attracted a large following of fans who are captivated by their story.
Springwatch presenter Kate Humble summed up the feelings of fans, by praising Amanda for being ‘absolutely authentic’ and showing the real life of a ‘hard-working woman’, who gave up her career as a model for farming life.
But for the Yorkshire Shepherdess, 50, the last few years have been anything but smooth.
From the breakdown of her marriage, a five-year love affair with her married web designer being exposed and her older children fleeing the nest to go to university, the TV star has faced a slew of personal trials and tribulations.
And now, as the second series of Amanda and her ex-husband’s new show, Our Farm Next Door: Amanda, Clive and Kids, hits screens, fans are growing concerned and claiming ‘something doesn’t seem right’ after she acted erratically during an appearance on Lorraine this week.
The programme follows the former couple, who split in 2022 after 22 years of marriage, as they renovate an abandoned farmhouse into a home with the help from their children.
Appearing on Lorraine on Tuesday, Amanda opened up about family life now as they continue to co-parent, which left worried viewers questioning whether she was okay.
Speaking about her relationship with Clive, Amanda said: ‘It’s about moving forward. We’ve got plenty to amuse ourselves. There’s space.
‘There’s room to get away from each other, if we’re being absolutely brutally honest here.
‘If we got on like a house on fire we wouldn’t be separate would we? But the fact of the matter is, we’ve got nine children, I think people think we lose track of the fact we do reality, reality comes with its ups and downs.
She candidly added: ‘It’s not all sunshine and spring time. That’s the reality, the reality is, we are just getting on with our lives and making it up as we go along.
‘With nine children, we have to adapt. it’s about adapting to make things work for you. Everyone finds themselves in a unique situation and we have to.
‘Actually, I’m quite proud of how we’re going on. It’s about priorities, right?’
She signed off the question with: ‘What’s important, everybody is getting on, everybody is happy, everybody is making it work. As for the rest of it, too bad.’
Some watching at home took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to share their concerns.
They wrote: ‘Is Amanda ok? Something doesn’t seem right #Lorraine’ and ‘Wow, Amanda is not looking well at all #lorraine.’
Others quipped: ‘She doesn’t look well’ and ‘She does not look well & yet Lorraine totally oblivious … or ignoring it.’
Fan concern is not surprising after Amanda won hearts with her down-to-earth attitude to everything from the hard work that goes into running a farm to child rearing.
She grew up in a traditional three-bed house with her parents and one sibling in the large market town of Huddersfield.
At 6ft 2in she was encouraged to follow the same career path as her model mother, but she hated the clothes and make-up that she had to wear.
Then one day, she chanced upon a book about shepherding.
‘It was the pictures, the landscape, the haggard faces of the men gathering in the fells, and the dogs… I thought “that’s my dream”,’ she said on the Channel 5 show.
‘In fact I couldn’t believe that kind of life really existed,’ she added.
Owen left her comfortable town life to work on farms around the country, but it’s when she knocked on the door of Ravenseat Farm that she found her calling.
‘I was destined to come here – I’m absolutely sure of it,’ she said on the show.Clive lived on the 2,000-acre plot of land and, despite 21-year age gap, the couple quickly fell in love and married in 2000.
Their nine children help out on the farm when they are not at university or school – or travelling to and from as the journey takes one-and-a-half hours each way.
‘In order to make a big family work they all need to tow the line. It’s not about child labour – it’s about pulling together,’ Owen told the Daily Mail in an article in 2018.
‘The snowflake generation, they can’t do anything,’ she previously told the Radio Times.
‘They don’t know anything about how to look after themselves, or a work ethic, all of that has gone out of the window. It’s our fault as parents.
‘If you put your child on a pedestal, with no sense of independence, and think you have got to entertain them the whole time, what can you expect?
‘I rebuff swaddling children, because I want to see them go on and do well and be themselves, whatever that is. I feel like it is their life and all I do is prepare them.
‘What we do on the farm, hopefully, is preparation for the big world. The lessons they get here will stand them in good stead.’
By the time she came to deliver daughter Clemmie, now five, she had already decided she could handle the incredible task on her own.
‘Our local maternity hospital is in Middlesbrough, which is 69 miles away, and on these roads, that takes a long time. So by baby number eight, I thought “sod it, I’ll do it myself”.
‘I knew the baby was in the right position, so when I felt the familiar feelings I went downstairs and had the baby in front of the fire with my terrier as a birthing partner.’
She added: ‘Clive wasn’t desperate to be at the birth, he was asleep upstairs. I went and woke him up with the baby.’
In June 2022, Amanda and Clive revealed that they had made ‘the difficult decision to separate’ but added that they would ‘continue to work on the farm and co-parent together’.
News of their separation had left fans of the show dismayed, but according to friends of the Owens they had been living apart for months before the announcement.
And rumours of marital troubles had been circling since late 2021, but they had always been denied by the couple.
Then, it emerged in April 2023 that Amanda had a five-year affair with married businessman Robert Davies, 71, and was living apart from husband Clive.
However, the duo have since returned to Ravenseat Farm in the Yorkshire Dales where they are bound by ‘a joint mission’ of successfully running the farm and bringing up their children, aged between nine and 23.
Robert’s wife Yasumi, 56, accused Amanda of living a ‘TV lie’ after she rumbled the affair, and said she had ‘lost everything’ after learning of Amanda’s relationship with Robert who she was married to for 12 years.
The fling between the pair began as she rose to fame on Our Yorkshire Farm and enlisted the web developer to work on her website.
The affair came to light after Yasumi found a note from the Yorkshire Shepherdess in Robert’s car and a box of Amanda’s possessions hidden in her bedroom.
Heartbreakingly, the contents showed the depth of feelings between the two and the note read: ‘Life is too short & happiness is too rare. I love you.’
Investment banker Yasumi, who hails from Tokyo recognised the handwriting from a signed copy of Owen’s new book as Robert had been working with Amanda on her personal website.
Yasumi said the businessman was ‘really kind’ until 2018 when she noticed a sudden change in his behaviour towards her after he started working with Amanda on her farming website.
After finding the note, Yasumi set about looking for more clues and she told The Sun that she then discovered some of Owen’s jewellery hidden in a box in their bedroom, including a necklace she had worn on TV which read: ‘Together forever.’
However, in September last year Amanda revealed that their relationship has ended and they were no longer on speaking terms.
In an interview with MailOnline at the time, the Shepherdess set the record straight and insisted: ‘I never set out looking for another relationship. Rob [Davies] was a friend that Clive and I had both known for a long time.
‘He put together the farm website and the digital aspect of the business, everything that we couldn’t do.
‘What he offered was conversation rather than confrontation, and Clive knew about it from the very beginning – he actually suggested Rob and I would be a good match.
‘At that point, a few years ago now, Clive was also seeing someone else and was openly dating. It wasn’t a secret, everyone roundabout knew, even the children.’
Meanwhile, Clive admitted: ‘I’d like people to know that what caused the split between us wasn’t anyone else – it was the constant fighting. My anger drove Amanda away.
‘Looking back on it I can see now that Amanda needed someone to talk to, someone she could trust, and at that stage I wasn’t that person.
‘Rob had always been a good friend to us, and we’d known him a long time. They got together at a point when we had already separated so I wasn’t shocked or horrified, and it was never an affair in my mind because I knew about it from the beginning.’
He added: ‘I resented her success, including the fact she got paid more for talking about sheep than I ever could farming sheep.
‘I was jealous, and I was difficult to deal with. It’s not easy to talk about and I’m not proud of my behaviour back then. I was awful to Amanda and, looking back, I think that my own depression had a part to play.
‘I was angry and drinking a lot of whisky. It was my way to cope, but it led to arguments, and as my behaviour got worse, it was too much for Amanda to bear.’
Now single and paving her own path, the Yorkshire shepherdess is ploughing on and making it work.
Earlier this month, she even revealed she had tried a different role alongside two of her children – Amanda, with son Miles and daughter Edith, were judges at Harrogate Dog Show.
And of course despite a difficult few years, Amanda teamed up with Clive once again for the new season of their show.
However, the couple’s brood of children are slowly moving on as they head to university and into the next chapter of their lives.
Amanda and Clive’s eldest, Raven, graduated from York St. John University in November 2022 after completing a course in Biomedical Science.
She is now currently working as an Assistant Scientist at DEFRA.
Speaking to The Sunday Times in November, Amanda looked to the future for herself and Clive as she explained: ‘We’re just getting on with it. We bicker. We argue. There’s no romance. But we’re all right with each other. And that’s a blessing.’
Reflecting on their shared priorities, she added: ‘We’re here and we’ve got a joint mission. It’s about securing the future of the farm, the children.’
Yet, fans who were hoping Amanda and Clive, who met when Amanda was just 21, might reconcile, will almost certainly be disappointed.
She commented: ‘If you’ve gone through a separation, there’s a reason you separated. And it’s usually because you’re not getting on. Who wants that?’
