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On Your Farm: Farming Hobbits

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02/04/2017

Farming Hobbits

BBC Radio 4 - On Your Farm, Farming Hobbits

Meet the Shire folk that farm the land made famous in the Lord of the Rings films.

Meet the Shire folk that farm the land made famous in the Lord of the Rings films. Nancy Nicolson visits the New Zealand farm where Peter Jackson filmed his epic adventures.

Nancy Nicolson travels to Middle Earth to discover how a remote corner of a 1250-acre New Zealand sheep station became one of the most famous pieces of farmland in the world.

When location scouts settled on the Alexander family farm near Matamata, just south of Auckland, as the location for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, it changed the fortunes of the traditional sheep unit which is run by two brothers.

Now Craig Alexander continues to run the sheep enterprise while his brother Russell manages Hobbiton, a global tourist destination attracting 500,000 visitors a year.

Nancy learns about the economics that have driven New Zealand sheep farmers to become more efficient; hears how the army was employed to drive roads into remote land and visits some of the Hobbit holes.

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