TWO farmers from the Post area have gone starkers for a good cause.

A calendar, featuring the farmers, has been released for 2019, with Jo Griggs from Marhamchurch, featuring on the front cover, while Jessica Martyn from Ashwater is Miss March.

The Farmers Calendar has been produced from Nicola de Pulford’s farm in the Harbourne Valley, near Totnes, since 1999, supporting a charity with each yearly publication. For 2019, the calendar is supporting the Chernobyl Children’s Lifeline.

The calendars cost £7.99 and are available from www.thefarmerscalendar.co.uk and Blackberry Farm Shop at Milton Damerel.

Nicola started the calendar after seeing the detrimental hardship of many farmers in the late 1990s. She said: “I was appalled by the hardship caused to farmers by the ban on the export of British beef and the foot and mouth outbreak two years later. To highlight their plight, I took the photographs and published the Naked Farmers calendar with a view to put a smile of people’s faces, and also to raise some money for a farming charity at that time.”

The Farmers Calendar was one of the first of its kind and has remained a bestseller ever since. Nicola now travels around the whole of the UK to take the photographs for her calendar, in between her own farming activities, mixed farming.

Most of the farming models contact Nicola via the calendar’s website or the Facebook page. She continued: “All the farming models are paid for being in the calendar, but they don’t normally know that when they contact me. As you can imagine, over the years I have met the most amazing farming families from across the UK and I am always made most welcome and we all end up laughing.”

Her work has also inspired her to write and illustrate with co-author John Hitchins a book called ‘Behind the Hedge’.